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 CRM There are also 2 realistic routes for the shopping cart – Open Source or commercial. There are excellent Open Source shopping carts such as OSCommerce and Zen, but also excellent commercial solutions such as Actinic and Customer Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with a complete CMS). There are other factors to consider with the shopping cart: Does it have its own or does it easily integrate with your exiting stock control systems? Does it integrate easily with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)? Does it have or integrate easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be proposed in future? Forum Many CMS have good integrated forums but if they do not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source package such as PunBB or phpBB. They are free, robust and easy to integrate and customise into any site. Email Most CMS, shopping carts and forums have email solutions. However, some solutions are very basic. If the chosen shopping cart solution that best meets the ecommerce and other requirements does not have an effective integrated email solution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications such as PHPlist are one alternative solution and the other is an online solution such as Constant Contact or many others. Statistics This is arguably the most important part of the package. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site profitability. Commercial applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.SITE MARKETING There are 4 major areas to consider here. Offline marketing – e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-web activities. Site optimisation – how to make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of other factors are initially and remain optimised so that as many high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained. Pay per click and other online marketing – how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on other sites. Email – how to grow the email list and use it to grow profitable sales. In summary: Manage the project Think how the customer thinks Get excellent software to make finding product and price easy Make terms clear and payment simple Ensure you are in stock have achievable delivery timescales Make sure you have a good CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai Market the site appropriately Know what's going on – use your stats to test, track and try Cost ............ well how long is a pice of string, but you could be up and running for far less than the cost of new premises!!!About the Author:Richard Hill is a director of E-CRM Solutions and has spent many years in senior direct and interactive marketing roles. E-CRM - http://www.e-crm.co.uk - helps you to grow by getting you more customers that stay with you longer. We provide practical solutions that pay for themselves. We help you to make sure that your marketing works. |
 
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