17.Oct.2011 How to launch a (successful) eshop – part two

Welcome to the second part in this guide on how to create your own online mercantile success story. The goal, again, is not to provide you with an A-Z guide on how to do it, but more or less provide you with a few guidelines based on customer experience feedback and case studies over the last few years.

So, let’s move on where we last started. By now, you should more or less have an idea on how your store will look, what exactly you will sell, how you will be selling it and who will help you with the whole process. If not, I suggest you read the first part one more time to make sure everything goes well.

Now that you have the store and the goods, you might think it’s showtime and time to cash in, but that’s not true… at all. The story only begins and there’s still quite a path in front of you. Before you will actually be able to cash in anything, you need to make sure customers can pay on your site. Easy? Maybe, but you need to make sure the payment process  is secure, smooth and customer-friendly.  Think C.A.S.H.: Customer, Acquisition, Security, Handiness:

Customer (or convenience). The customer is the person that comes on your site with a certain need in order to satisfy this need. In order to be able to satisfy this need, the customer needs to offer a certain something in return (since you will not be running a charity). This certain something is money, which in this scenario needs to be transferred electronically. This also means that you will need to make sure that the customer gains trust in you store in the first place and that the way to pay (W2P) is as convenient as possible.

Acquisition.  How will you acquire the money? In other words: how will you make sure that the money transits from its original location to your bank account? How fast do you need this transfer to be? (ex: bank transfers are cheap but they’re damn slow and will make sure your customer gets his/her goods at least 2-3 days later)

Security. Without any doubt one of the most important parts in the payment process and sadly enough the most forgotten one. Without security, you will be exposed to two dangers: the customer not having any trust in your store and you losing money.

Handiness. Even though you need to think about the customer, think about your own convenience as well. You will have better things to do than following up bank transfers or handling fraud yourself. Always leave this to someone else. Always.

To make a long story short, you will need to think your payments through and leave nothing to chance, since you will get in trouble (or will get customers in trouble… and what goes around comes around) if you simply go for the cheapest or easiest solution. Furthermore, many payment methods are less secure than you might think and no matter what, you should always watch out for non-guaranteed methods or providers.

If for instance, you take a look at my current employer, which is Ogone, one of Europe’s major payment service providers, you will notice that the solution isn’t the cheapest (at all), especially for starting entrepreneurs, but on the other hand, it offers a great balance within the C.A.S.H. model mentioned above. You get tons of security, a smooth user experience (thanks to a vast majority of payment methods) and once it’s installed, there’s pretty nothing you need to do. Feel free to contact me should you want to use it.

So now it’s up to you again, make sure you find a good payment service provider that knows the (different) markets you will be selling on and has a decent fraud protection tool. For the European entrepreneurs amongst you, feel free to contact me in order to get started.