Set up your Online Shop

Thinking of setting up an

e-com site? You have to take care of three functions here–a storefront

where customers can shop and place orders, validation of payments, and

maintaining a customer profile, apart from getting the back-end

infrastructure in place. Here, we help you create your storefront.

Validation of payments can be done through e-mail, or by direct

communication to the bank’s server in case of credit cards. Otherwise, to

avoid these validation hassles, you can enable payments through check or

demand draft or send the product by VPP.

We’ve used a software

called StoreFront Web Creator to create the storefront and add a shopping

cart. This software is wizard-driven, and you don’t need to know HTML or

any kind of scripting. It takes you through the process of setting up your

site, and helps you decide its look and feel and navigation.

So, let’s get started with

using the software to create your storefront. We’ve divided the process

into five simple steps.

Basic information:

You have to provide your company name, address, logo, phone and fax

numbers, a link to your homepage, and any other contact information that you

want to give to your online customers. Then, you have to specify how you’d

like to receive the orders. There are five options:

• E-mail, that is, orders are sent to you
  
  via e-mail
• A form per product ordered
• A shopping cart, where the customer
  
  browses around your site, and adds the products he wants to the shopping
  
  cart
• An order form with a list of products
• An order form with an entry field, where
  
  the customer types in the name and the number of units of the products
  
  he wants

A shopping cart is the preferred method of

these, as it is convenient for you as well as the shopper, who can edit his

purchases when he’s through with the shopping

Data entry and

updation: The next important step is to

prepare a catalogue of the various products. Tell the StoreFront wizard how

you would like to set up the navigation. Then enter the actual data. You can

create a new catalogue, or open an existing catalogue, if you have to update

the data. It’s also possible to import a catalogue if you have one as a

text or a LST file

Shipping

information: You now have to specify the

shipping modes. If you have more than one shipping option that the customer

is free to choose from, specify them here. If you have some extra charges

for each shipping mode, you’ll have to specify those too. Other policies

like warranty and return have to be declared here. If you want to send an

order confirmation to shoppers, enter that here too

Mode

of payment: Here, you decide the modes of

payment a shopper on your site can use–credit card, check or demand draft,

or VPP. You have to specify all the payment options here. You can specify a

maximum of five options, as StoreFront doesn’t accept more than this

number. Also, specify the currency of transaction Look/navigation:

The final stage is to create the look of the site. This creates the

actual pages and adds the background, icons, and buttons. It also arranges

the various components that you’ve specified above on the various pages.

You can choose the look of your site from the themes available in the

package.

Now, you can compile the site and upload it

onto the Web server. StoreFront allows you to directly ftp the pages created

onto the site. But we would advise you to save a copy on your local disk,

test it out first, and then upload it to the server. However, to check out

your site on your local disk, you’ll need a personal Web server so that

the server-side scripting included by StoreFront can be executed