Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ecommerce

How do I get US-address-only items delivered to Australia?

katala — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:22:10 -0800

Can anyone please recommend a reputable mail-forwarding service for someone living in Australia who wants to buy from US-only stores? Hi MeFites, I need to buy some items (headbands of all things!) which I can only find on US store websites and they will only ship to a US address (no international shipping provided).

Can anyone please recommend a good mail-forwarding service who I can have my items shipped to, and then they will ship them to me in Australia?

Many thanks in advance for any help you can give!

Katala

Taking on the juggernaut that is Ebay?

pakoothefakoo — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:25:14 -0800

Taking on the juggernaut that is Ebay? I'm very well aware that there are numerous of failed Ebay/CL clones out there, but I have an idea for some kind of online marketplace that is a mix between Ebay and Craigslist using some kind of automated arbitrage system (I won't go into details, as it is not pertinent to my question).

Ebay and Craigslist are outliers, they both filled the need while there were no other alternatives and became a beast surviving on its own inertia. Other than technology costs, the barrier to entry in this business is quite high because people are loath to switch and it's difficult when you don't have any buyers or sellers using your system.

So my question is it possible to form a similar, successful business and reach critical mass in this day and age? If so, how do I convince people to use it when I have no critical mass?

I do believe that my vision is nifty, but I am aware of incredible challenges of getting people to use my system, is it worth trying?

Help me improve my customer service.

Kerasia — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:37:46 -0800

Looking for tips and advice to improve my customer service for my online store. When you buy something online - a tangible item that is posted - what makes you think "hey, great customer service!"? I won't detail what I already do as I want a clean slate for suggestions. But I am sure I can improve on my current practices both for giving the personal touch and presenting a professional attitude. My items are all of the same kind but each is unique. They do not have or need warranties, except for breakages during delivery or non-receipt of items.

I am looking for tips to improve my customers' experience with dealing with my business from the time an order is received to the period after they have received their items in the post. And related, is their such a thing as too much customer service?

A wordpress site where customers can log in to their account.

brenton — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:13:01 -0800

A wordpress plugin to make a "customer login" section. Ok, I know it's weird to ask this on mefi, but after failing elsewhere on the net, I thought I'd give it a try.

My wordpress site sells one and only one product, which is renewed weekly (aka a subscription).

I want the customer to fill out some data that I want, then they're taken to paypal to pay (and they have to fill out some new data [like credit card info] which I don't care about seeing, though some of it is redundant [name] so it'd be nice if that was pre-polulated in the paypal page). (By the way, this is a small operation so I can't afford to "upgrade" paypal beyond "website payments standard.")

Then later, customers can come back, log into their "my account" section, and make changes: like updates to their name or address, or canceling their subscription.

Also, I want access to all the data about all my customers.

There has to be a wordpress plugin that does something like this. I've tried a few e-commerce plugins, but they all failed in one way or another... what advice does metafilter have for me?

How to make a product catalog?

Harry — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 02:34:07 -0800

I'm looking for tips on making a product catalog for a website, but not a fully fledged online shop. What options are there? I'm building a website for an acquaintance, who is a local dealer in car cleaning products. He wants to show (a selection of) his products for sale, but doesn't actually need or want an online shop.

So, preferably, I'd like to have just the product catalog part of a webshop, but without the pricing and checkout parts. Are there any solutions out there that allow this? Or is it really something I should think about programming myself?

EFT Security Recommendations

branwen — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:27:39 -0800

Is there a required or recommended security standard, compliance, or best practice for entities in the USA for collecting and storing bank account and routing numbers? We will not be collecting credit/debit card information (so PCI DSS not required)...only bank account information for the purpose of Electronic Funds Transfer. The information will be stored and batch transmitted to our bank on a daily basis. Aside from the general measures in regards to site security and proper encryption of the information, are there any other specific requirements our developers need to be aware of?

Selling a new invention to the world...suggestions on shopping carts and cc processing?

msoffab — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:46:35 -0800

Selling a new invention to the world online...suggestions on shopping carts and cc processing? I am redoing my friends website for a new invention...it's a bottle opener for screw cap wine bottles.

I am in the process of redoing the site and I want to know your suggestions on payment processing for a single item like this. PayPal is ok or we could sign up for a regular merchant account and gateway. As far as rates, I have a cc processor/merchant account, so I care about gateway and ecommerce fees on top of my cc processor's rates.

I am looking for a dead simple solution like shopify or something that can easily be created to handle the ecommerce as well as allow for static pages (ie press, video demonstrations, about us, contact, etc). It would be nice to have some type of backend for supporting order status, shipping, receipts, etc. But no one feature would be a deal breaker for me. It should be 2-3 clicks before they click 'place order'

Eventually, we would like to setup landing pages how shamwow does it. They have a single page that is optimized for conversions (probably using A/B testing) and allows for the customer to place an order on the same page. Any suggestions for this?

Bonus question: would this change if I had 1-3 products to sell? I got another buddy who is inventing something and there are a couple indirect products he is selling related to it. I am hoping to use the same dead simple system on there too.

Thanks for reading that long and drawn out question :)

Professional quality product shots from home.

infinityjinx — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:31:43 -0800

Home photography filter: Tips/tricks on taking/editing professional-looking self-modeled product shots for my clothing web store. Hi all,

I've been making funky costumes/outfits/clubwear for years it's time I try my hand at a real webstore. I have a brand name, a domain and a line in progress. How do I take awesome/cute/sexy/fun product shots of my clothes? Difficulty - I want to model them.

Here's what I have...

Panasonic Lumix DMZ-28
Tripod
Some white sheets and lots of colored fabric
My apartment
An industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn

What do you recommend? What are your tips for professional-looking self-modeled product shots with no budget and incredibly amateur tools? I'm looking for everything from modeling/location tips to how to achieve optimal lighting, to camera settings, to post processing tips. Do you think white backgrounds are best, or should I shoot at different locations - or does that just depend on my personal aesthetic?

Let's assume I'm fairly competent with my camera and I'm a quick learner of new skills. I'm also open to great books or super helpful web links (my Googling results have been mediocre so far).

Thank you!!

Personal experience with payment processors that offer very simple transaction processing?

odinsdream — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:22:25 -0800

Personal experience with payment processors that offer very simple on-site credit card entry and the ability to sell digital goods (i.e., license codes, subscriptions, etc.). I'd like customers to enter the bare minimum of payment information. I'd like to accept credit-card payments on my website. I can already do this with Paypal or Google Checkout, but they are more complex than I'd prefer for this particular venture. Features I'd like include:

Bare minimum of data entry. I've purchased from sites that require only the credit card number and an expiration date. Examples include paying for a new account on Shopify, or paying for a checked bag on Delta and US Airways. I don't need to collect names, shipping information, or anything else for this product. It's a very inexpensive virtual good, which is why I'd like to make the customer payment experience as painless and hassle-free as possible.

Entry of data on my site, or at least visually similar enough to appear to be my site. Examples include Panic Software, Shopify, Delta, and US Airways.*

Able to process digital goods that are unique to each customer. Panic Software is a good example here. Immediately after you pay you get the product unlock code, which is unique to that transaction. I want this to be completely automatic. Out of the box Google Checkout doesn't seem to work for this. With their API it looks like it could work, but they don't meet my other requirements.

Do you have personal experience with payment processors that meet most or all of these requirements?

* Note on PCI compliance: This requirement is really a visual thing. The actual HTML form doesn't need to come from my server. I'm not interested in actually storing the credit card data - I'd still like it to go directly to the payment processor without passing through me. I just want the customer to have a seamless experience of not appearing to leave my site.

The best of the best

simplesharps — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:15:41 -0800

If money was no obstacle, what complete eCommerce solution would you deploy for a medium to large online company? A complete solution could mean two systems tied together, one for the website and another for inventory (think about managing a large warehouse) or a system that handles both. The perfect product could be one developed from scratch, an existing framework that we could manipulate to our specific needs or a complete ready-to-go product.

I'm trying to identify examples of best practice solutions for the medium sized company and upwards - there are plenty of solutions for the small business (magento, shopify etc)

Thanks!

ass gas or grass?

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:53:01 -0800

What are some examples of Medium-High Traffic websites that have successfully started to make money and how did they do it? It's been 5 years since This Question and many things have happened on the web. I help to run a pretty high traffic (~150k visitors a month) site in a specific demographic. I have some ideas about how to make money off of it without driving away our users, but some examples of others that went from labor of love to money-making without a lot of fuss or being sold would be helpful, but I can only think of giant ones, or Metafilter, obviously. Unique details would help a lot.

Thanks!

Should I pay VAT on an item shipping to the UK from the USA?

Del Chimney — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:13:41 -0800

I just bought an item online. I am in the UK. The seller is in the US. Payment was made through Paypal and I was charged VAT (UK Sales Tax). Is this a mistake? Google searches are throwing up conflicting information. Since the seller is in the USA then can they claim VAT? Has Paypal automatically added it to the total amount due just because I am in the UK?

I assume that I am due a refund but am not sure if I should be approaching the seller or Paypal themselves in order to get one.

Can anybody shed any light on this? Cheers.

Does listing every single location you service help your PageRank?

study the living world — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:02:14 -0800

SEOFilter: I'm no pro at this, but check out the footer here. Is this crazy strategy of any benefit when it comes to location-specific searches? One would think so, but I've never seen such an exhaustive, derivative list of pages before.

How do I set up an e-commerce site that accepts photo uploads and takes credit card payments?

designbot — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:42:48 -0800

How do I set up an e-commerce site that accepts photo uploads and takes credit card payments? I've been asked to set up a website for a client who wants to custom-print an item using photos uploaded by customers. They need to accept credit card payments.

As one option, I am considering setting up a custom front-end for Shopify, but I'm not sure whether that's overkill, or whether they can accept an uploaded picture sent as part of the order information.

What's the simplest/best way to do this? My PHP/Javascript skills are rather rudimentary, but I'd like to learn more. Should I try to do something from scratch, or are there good solutions out there already?

It seems like there would be a few parts to doing this manually:

Getting the customer's order info from a form (I can handle the HTML for this)

Getting the customer's photo, making sure it's within specs, and displaying a reduced preview (I don't know the best way to do this… I assume there a image processing libraries available or something)

Processing a credit card payment (I don't know the best way to do this)

Doing something with that order data (could it be emailed to the client, or is that too insecure? would I need to set up a front end for the client to access orders stored in a database?)

Hope me, Metafilter! You're my only help.

How do I generate meaningful results from split tests?

gi_wrighty — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:13:34 -0800

Having run split tests on the e-commerce website at work, how do I extract meaningful conclusions from the raw data? At work we occasionally run split tests on our website to try out new functionality, content and layouts. Visitors to the site see one of the available options and when orders are placed we record which option they saw.

This means we have order totals for each option but how do we work out if one is statistically better than the other? From past experience different tests take different amounts of time to settle in the general trend (i.e. conversions increase by x%).

Is there anyway of knowing if a trend we're seeing at the moment is just a side effect of randomly assigning people to the different options or it's actually a genuine improvement?

Or is there a way of calculating the minimum number of results before having confidence that the trend is actually trend and not just noise?

Magento gift card tracking?

AceRock — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:21:41 -0800

Magento Filter: Best way to track gift card purchases? I'm trying to find a way to track gift card purchases on a user level: meaning, associating a gift card PIN number for example with specific products purchased with that PIN, along with information like data and time purchased. What would the best way be to go about doing this?

Wordpress Plugins / Addons: Looking for Product viewer (non ecommerce) module + contact form.

spinko — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:52:30 -0800

Wordpress Plugins / Addons: Looking for Product viewer (non ecommerce) module + contact form. A friend wants a site, wants to showcase products like on ecommerce sites but without the payment terminal. Just showing the product information.

Is their a plugin for Wordpres that will allow this.

Show products in a category
Upload product picture (auto thumbnail + normal image)
Contact us form

Give me advice on installing an ecommerce shopping cart.

zorro astor — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:40:54 -0800

Need advice on pitfulls/things to look for when installing a shopping cart on an ecommerce platform. I am a PHP programmer with moderate experience (500 hours) and am wondering about the pitfalls of installing a shopping cart. I have been given the task and know more or less nothing about it. The person commissioning the job wants to use paypal, but wants to use a merchant account (ie doesn't want user to have to sign up for a paypal account. Possible?). I am thinking about zen cart and oscommerce as those seem to be the biggest.

Feel free to offer any advice even if it doesn't fall strictly withing the boundaries of the question.

Strange prices for used books on Amazon

srboisvert — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:00:26 -0800

Why are there used books for sale on amazon for far more than amazon sells them for? For example this book: Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions (Paperback) retails for just under $32 brand new but there are three used book resellers that have prices starting at $69.

What gives?

Shopping cart software to work across multiple domains?

mtstover — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:19:30 -0800

Shopping cart software to work across multiple domains? I want to create a series of niche sites, displaying only a couple of products each. I want a e-commerce engine that I can create to centrally manage pricing, the payment and shipping calculations, and inventory across all the sites. Ideally it would also create customized emails, etc relevant to each domain. 1. It should be cheap.
2. It should be simple (I only want to create product "modules" to integrate into dead-simple HTML pages.)
3. It should be hosted by somebody else - I don't want to spend all my time worrying about uptime, etc.
4. And, ideally, it should be on this list to easily integrate with my shipping outsourcer: http://www.shipwire.com/help/c/how-it-works/carts/

Thanks HiveMind!

How to combine multiple physical shops and an online catalog within one website

web-goddess — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:12:54 -0800

Can you think of any examples of a retailer that has both a chain of physical stores and a "shop online" section? I've been helping out a friend who owns a knitting store with his website, and now that he's expanding I think we need to rethink the way his site works. I'm just wondering how other people organise things like stock levels when more than one physical location is involved. The existing setup we have is that there is one physical bricks-and-mortar, and orders for the "online shop" are filled from there. Customers know that the stock levels shown on the website are what is physically present in the Sydney store. Now we're going to throw a couple more shops into the mix. The orders will still be filled out of the main Sydney store though, so I'm unsure whether to show multiple stock levels, just the Sydney level (along with a disclaimer), or a combined stock level (again with a disclaimer).

Also, there are plenty of mega-retail chains where the site is just all about the online catalog and the list of locations is relegated to a link in the corner. This business is a lot smaller than that, and we'd like to emphasize the character of the individual shops. The only good example I can find is Tessuti Fabrics. They make it clear in their online catalog that the stock levels only refer to one of their locations.

So, can anybody think of any similar examples? I'd like to see how other people tackle the issue.

(Incidentally, I wasn't sure whether to list this under "computers & internet" or "shopping." I'm guessing the "computers" folks might be more useful in terms of the UI issues.)

How to get started receiving recurring payments

bleeb — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:55:52 -0800

Can someone help me get started with recurring payments (receiving them, that is). I've got access to Miva Merchant. Will that help? I know Paypal can handle recurring payments, but I'm inclined to believe there are better and cheaper ways.

I can haz developer???

spicynuts — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:33:30 -0800

Does this person exist, relatively cheaply: drupal, PHP, Flash, CSS developer? All rolled into one. I am tired of paying time and materials to outsource new dev/maintenance of our ecomm website. We are a start up and the costs of continued development now look to be about the same as the cost of hiring an in house resource, depending on whether my estimate of salary for this kind of person is accurate or that a single individual that can do all of this exits.

So here is what I would need this single person to be able to do:

1) implement new drupal templates for design of new pages on site
2) write new functionality that uses drupal/php to access database and manage data, users, products, etc
3) our site is an integration of Flash and CSS using a drupal engine - I want someone who can develop/optimize/fix the functionality that uses communication between the Flash customer facing stuff and the back end for transaction management, customer activity, non-transactional features, etc
4) handle day to day changes to pages on site based on promotions or testing of 'stickiness' to see how customers respond..so, like swapping out banners, areas of content, moving content around, etc
5) develop better interfaces for product and content management into drupal and the MySQL database - we use a stupid excel file now and drupal falls apart easily...I'd like to be able to develop some kind of web-based interface that uses php or something to directly into the product database and do our inventory and product management.

Is this completely unrealistic? For example, is this a team of three people rather than one person? If it is one person is this someone who should be earning 150K/annum due to the skill set or is it a lower level salary? Can anyone help me understand what's possible here better?

We're shopping for a new ecommerce solution. Help!

GilloD — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:08:36 -0800

We need a new e-commerce provider (Volusion, Shopify etc.) and I'm looking for suggestions from current platform users or general opinons. We have a set of somewhat specific needs. More inside. Right now we have an e-commerce provider and web host whose name shall be withheld and a back-end order fulfillment service called OrderMotion. ECom handles all of the web admin and passes orders to Order Motion to be processed and fulfilled by our warehouse.

OrderMotion changed their pricing this year and, for us, that meant a TEN-FOLD increase in price. So we made the decision to ditch them and pick up an ERP to better suit our growing business. At this point, it's likely to be Sage or SAP. Both of their CRM-ends are an afterthought at best. With this came the opportunity to ditch our current ECom Provider. They are TERRIBLE. Their design is horrible, we can't change it, no new style sheets, no php, no jQuery- We can only add text. That's it. Support is also horrible and their pricing just jumped. So! We're essentially rebuilding our web empire from scratch and I want to make sure that it goes well.

To give you an idea of our size, we did about 6 mil in total sales last year. 90% of that was in wholesale. 2% from a brick and mortar store and about 8% from web sales. I am totally sure we can bump that number, our current website is atrocious. Anyway- We're doing a few hundred thousand in web sales. Hence why the ERP/accounting takes precedence over the CRM end.

Here are our specific requests: Integration with the ERP: It needs to be able to pass order data to the ERP for fulfillment. This is the alpha and omega. I realize this really depends on the ERP we choose, but an API or some build-out is a must.

Does it allow for jQuery/PHP inside of it's templating? If not, Is it possible to sort of segment off part of the site so that the promo things are either handled "cold", via handwritten code or another CMS like Joomla? We have several features (Store Locator and ECards) that would need to come with us. This is a concern with Volusion.

It must have flexible templates. I was excited to hop into Volusion's templates, too, until I got a look at (GASP!) nested tables. Ugh.

Data Reporting: As far as customer data goes, our current e-commerce supplier provides us with 0 data about our customers. What we know comes in two parts: Web traffic data from Google Analytics and general order-metrics from OrderMotion. What this means is that I know that 7000 people looked at Product X yesterday and that 1000 of them ordered. But if Joe orders Product X, I have no idea what else he may have looked at. I have no idea what else people who ordered product X looked at. That data lives in two different places and never the twain shall meet. How much customer data does it hold onto? How does it report data?

CRM: With regards to customer problems, we have an 800 number and an e-mail address. Sometimes the Call Center needs to key in an order for a customer. Doing this via ERP can be expensive as we pay-by-user. Does it track enough customer order data to be able to alter or key-in orders outside on an ERP/back-end? Also, does it contain any kind of ticketing system for customer concerns? What's the good word on CRM?

E-mail marketing. Does it have it built-in? Is there an additional cost? What's the allotment per month? We have about 25k subscribers at the moment and use a 3rd party.

Also: Multiple-stores: Can we get a price break? Can it handle foreign currencies?

I realize this is an enormous amount of information, but if any MeFiites have an answer to even one of those questions based on their experience, it'd be a gigantic help. I've toyed with the free trials, poked at the APIs, but that's a far cry from actually resting our business on it. I'm nervous

Our top 2 contenders at the moment are Volusion (Nice API, bad templating, bad support, insane hosting plan (15gb a month for 150 bucks?!) and Shopify (I adore adore adore Shopify, but I'm afraid it might not have the muscle we need). We have no full-time IT dudes, I'm basically the only person who knows ASP from a snake (ha!) and Java from coffee (ha!), so I'll be dropping the rest of my duties and moving full time on the integration. Which is why I shied away from something like zNode that'd require functional, complete knowledge of C# or .net.

But! Opinons, suggestions. Casual users, hardcore dudes, devs and buyers, lend me your ears.

How can I build a homebrew online music store?

serial_consign — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:30:19 -0800

What are some open source/inexpensive e-commerce solutions for developing a homebrew online music store? I've been charged with designing the site of an independent record label and the only concern I have is their desire for an online record store. They want to sell both physical media and dowloads.

Ideally I'd like to use Drupal for this site as that is my platform of choice. However, I don't have much experience with the e-commerce or ubercart modules and I don't anticipate connecting cart functionality with a music player/browser would be much fun.

Beyond Drupal, I'm curious as to if there are any open source or affordable music oriented e-commerce/cms solutions out there. Since the store will be one of the central features of the site - it may be worth choosing the e-commerce solution first and reconciling the rest of the site design with the limitations of that platform.

Any suggestions as to platforms to investigate would be greatly appreciated.