| eCommerce, Part 4: Order Processing by Crimson Star |
Once a customer has made his product selection, you need to close the sale fast -- before he leaves it on the counter and walks out. Your Web site's on-line store better close sales fast too, or your customers will abandon their shopping carts and spend their money somewhere else. Last month, we examined shopping carts from the product selection point-of-view. These same programs are also responsible for processing the customer's order. Billing and Shipping Once your customer has selected some products, your shopping cart closes the sale by helping him check out. You need to obtain accurate billing and shipping information from him, but you must do it quickly. The first step is to decide when to do it, and how often. Do you expect repeat customers? If so, will you force them to re-enter their billing and shipping information every time they place an order? This could be very frustrating for them. You can relieve this frustration and project a more professional appearance by collecting this information on their first visit, storing it in a database, and re-using it for future orders. DO NOT use cookies to store this or any information on the customer's computer. Most responsible adults disable the use of cookies by their browser, so you will lose valuable sales if your shopping cart attempts to use them. If you maintain a customer database, you are responsible for its use or misuse. Do not store credit card data or other sensitive information that a hacker could exploit. Do not sell your customer database to a mailing-list company or spam company. Many Web sites invite new customers to pre-register before placing an order. If and when the customer places an order, he enters his customer code and his billing and shipping information is added to the order automatically. The customer must have the option to make corrections, however, so your shopping cart should check to see if your database needs to be updated each time the customer places an order. If you don't expect repeat customers, or they wouldn't want their names in your database, then you can simply collect this information from them for each order. Your shopping cart uses forms to collect customer information. Many free and commercial shopping carts are built by amateurs and may not work with your clients. Do you expect Canadian customers? Will the form accept and validate Province names or abbreviations? What about Canadian Postal Codes? People from countries outside of North America often have much longer addresses than us, but most shopping carts ignore this simple fact. If yours does, then you will lose business. Remember, if your market is local conduct your marketing in the newspapers, on radio or TV, or whatever. If your market is global, use the Internet and make sure anyone in the world can place an order using your shopping cart. Payment Options Your order processing forms must let your customer select a payment method that he or she feels is secure and risk-free. There are many options, but you probably only need to offer two or three. If your customers are not in a hurry and need to minimize their risks, just let them mail you a check or money order. This should always be an option. Do you expect repeat business from the same clients? Maybe you should simply invoice them once a month or send them a statement of the month's invoices. If you already have a business relationship with clients, you don't need to change your invoicing methods just because you are changing your ordering methods. Good old C.O.D. might be appropriate for some situations, so don't overlook that option. The previous options all work, but they don't actually complete the process of eCommerce. We have already decided that on-line payment is required in a true eCommerce application. The most popular payment method available today is on-line credit card processing. This is a very difficult, time-consuming and expensive option to set up. It is a "must-have" in today's marketplace, so we will discuss it in a separate column. There is a new alternative to credit card payment that has just been announced. Several telephone companies have teamed up to provide a new processing service for Web store owners. The details are still sketchy, but it seems that a customer is redirected from your on-line store to a 900-number where he authorizes payment of your bill. He is then sent back to your store, and the sale is complete. The bill appears on the customer's phone bill. Somehow, you eventually get paid. One catch is that this only works for customers who have connected to your Web site over a modem connection. This won't work with a cable-TV, aDSL, ISDN or similar connection. I'd give them a year or two to work this one out. Next month we will review on-line credit card processing in more detail.
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