Do You Need an Ecommerce Website?

Generally ecommerce sites sold by hosting companies are online shops, which are capable of handling the entire transaction, from product select to payment, electronically.

So in deciding whether or not you need an ecommerce solution you should ask yourself if you need to handle the whole process electronically or can part of the process be done manually/offline.

Degrees of Ecommerce

To add to the confusion of what constitutes an ecommerce sites, there are possibilities of adding ecommerce capabilities to a site that wasn't actually designed for ecommerce.

This is typically done with PayPal buy know buttons (or equivalent), and is the main method of selling single items online.

Using Offline Solutions

Although it may be tempting to try and do everything online your business may be better suited for collecting payments and/or orders offline.

Take for example a bed and breakfast/small hotel site. It is perfectly feasible, and maybe better practise, to use the site to attract customers and handle the booking and payments by traditional methods (e.g. telephone/email reservations and payment on checkout) rather than trying to emulate large hotel chains that handle the reservation and payment using an online booking system.

General Guidelines

If you are only selling a small number of products/services then using a traditional site and adding the ecommerce functionality by using paypal (or equivalent), or handling the ordering/payment offline is the better choice.

If you are selling a large number of products (>20) then usually an ecommerce site using a store is the better option.

Examples

Business: Computer consultant selling general computer services.

Solution: Standard website and take orders using telephone/contact form/email billing using invoice and payment by cheque/paypal.

Business: Hardware shop selling 100s of products.

Solution: Shopping cart for product listing, payments using PayPal or other payment provider of choice.

Note: You may have noticed PayPal is mentioned frequently as it is really the best payment option for small businesses when the online transactions are under $2000/month.

See PayPal review for more details.

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