We’ve been building and maintaining the Official Baden Sports Online store ‘badenball.com’ since 2007, and over that time we’ve seen a dramatic change in the ecommerce technology and customer user experience evolution. Not only has the technology become more sophisticated and easier to use, but more importantly, the sophistication of the user has also substantially increased. Customers are quick to discern what’s a ‘reputable’ site and what’s not, and are very savvy in their purchasing decisions. Basically you can summarize this simply: You’ve got 10 seconds to convince the buyer to stay and purchase from you, or your out. Competition is getting extremely fierce, but don’t worry, there’s a lot you can do to make your site sticky, and ultimately, create the sale.
There’s no more question about ‘if credit cards are safe online,’ now it’s a whole price/performance mix of good price, customer service, timely delivery, and most importantly, brand reliability. What this means is, does your eCommerce site look canned, or look old and outdated (outdated in web terms is 2008)?
How does your shopping cart perform? Does it have a one page checkout? Does the detail page offer enough information without being cluttered or hard to navigate to? Does it take advantage of the little nice features that the newer Ajax technology offer, i.e. quick views, real time stock levels etc?
How visible is your store to the search engines? Does it automatically upload to Yahoo and Google merchant? Are all the product pages “Search Engine Friendly” as well as human friendly?
Does your store also sell on eBay and Amazon, and if so, how easily does it publish products and publish inventory?
Financially, how does your store interface with your accounting systems? Does it plug in directly into Quickbooks or another off the self package?
Badenball.com went through all these questions and more, and in fact has upgraded 3 times over the past 3 years, each time to a better cart technology. Currently it’s built on the Magento eCommerce platform because of it’s superb front end technology and more importantly for any shop owner, the back-end flexibility. In 2007, it cost around $15K to get into some form of a fulfillment and inventory management system. But for low end systems, while all carts can process orders and ship plugins, there’s still a bit of cut/pasting going on between the entire chain, i.e. from the order, to the shipping warehouse and back to the customer with a tracking numbers. Amazingly today, there’s still relatively few low end systems (i.e. for stores shipping less than 100-200 orders) that are inexpensive and do the entire round trip of fulfillment. But Magento has a couple of inexpensive solutions for fulfillment, and it’s huge advantage is that it has a superb API (Application Programming Interface), which, with a little bit of coding, you can couple just about any fulfillment system into it.
Magento also has several third party modules that save hours and hours of work, like MailChimp’s list synchronizer, Order exporting, and blog integrator plugins to WordPress. This makes Magento a substantial player in the industry for the moment.
By using Magento and several third party plugins, Badenball.com is now almost completely automated from an order processing and fulfillment point of view. Inventory has been outsourced to a third party shipper with modules controlling shipping orders and inventory count.
