Small shop eCommerce

Does anyone here own a small shop that trades online?

If so, what would you say is the main thing that you require in an eCommerce application?

Somthing along the lines of automatic paper management (i.e. order sheets etc. are printed off as required, so you dont lose the labels) stock management (so the system automatically orders new stock as needed) or barcode input (to speed order tracking)

Or as a customer, what do you want out of an e-Shop? Real-time order tracking? Fast dispatch?

Just a bit of un-official opinion poll (yet again!) for a job I've taken on (or going to take on) in the near future. Thanks for your input!

 

I have a friend who wrote a system for a major computer manufacturer... Bar codes are the way to go I think. Their parts inventory is not on the floor more than 23 days before it's assembled and shipped. They get their supplies just in time to be assembled and shipped. When they purchase online it is assigned a number and you can track it all the way through. Makes them competitiive cause they don't keep a huge inventory and they can start shipping newer technology faster without having to burn off excess inventory.

 

Ah yes, J.I.T. is a major part of modern industry, and what makes most volume production companies work so well (cars and computers, for example). Parts are ordered in small quantities to satisfy predicted sales and actual sales, and so the parts come together as the order is processed. Zero stock, therefore zero loss on stock.

This particular job we are either going to go for the intergrated solution (basically adding the web end to the current setup) or, we go for the complete solution were ALL purchases are logged by the online system, and so all trading is done using the online DB... so all your info is in one place, and can be manipulated much easier (finances would be a whole lot easier).

Depending on how involved we want to get, we might go for the barcode option, where one machine is dedicated to stock management, which is linked to the online DB and so you can have live stock status on the website. But as this is only a small company, there may not be any point in that.

 

Coming from a family who started their own small business that grew into a 30+ shop, I would say that while we were still a small small outfit our computing needs were more in he area of of payroll, HR and accounting. At the start, inventory and delivery schedules just required a sharp eye and mind. Automating for the sake of automating is not justification unto itself.

But at that time computing resources were expensive as were the tracking systems they run on. I'm sure there are many out of the box products that work well.

 

Well I've not actually spoken to them yet, but I *think* they want to give their customers a catalog to choose from, and then put an order in over the net, and they just treat it like any other order.

But, of course, I've not spoken to them yet so I don't know, I'm just speculating so I can get a bit of a headstart when it comes to planning.

We probably will make our own product, and use that as we can support it better and gives us more flexibility to cusomise it for peoples needs, and is in the end cheaper for us. The real money isn't in designing websites, it's in designing web business applications, and if we make the application ourselves then it's an exclusive product with good support (we know exactly what every line of code does) we can change near enough anything we like and still make a significan profit from it.