Before we decide whether or not to go for it, we should ask ourselves what it is we are going for. This can be answered very simply by stating the goal. Your goal is really a statement of what the desired result of this endeavor should be. Here is the goal for the example site:
Contechst Books' Goal: To build and maintain an elegant and effective online bookstore that will allow customers to browse the website and purchase books and e-books for delivery or download, in order to generate extra revenue and increase competitiveness and market share by using an online medium.
The goal is pretty abstract at this stage since we don't even know what exactly is going on the site until we begin designing it. The important thing here is to state what you want the site to do in general and relate that to your needs as a business. If the first part of the goal (what the site is expected to do) relates well to the second part (how the site relates to the business) then the goal is coherent. Only you can determine whether the goal is accurate because the goal depends entirely on what you want for your business.
Now, there are several things to consider before we can make the choice to go ahead with investing time, money, and resources into building a complex, albeit relatively easy to implement, enterprise application. By and large though, the short answer to the question "Do I go for it?" is a resounding "Yes!". Even so, it is still worthwhile to think about whether or not to go ahead and build a site, because doing so will help to outline exactly what needs to be put into the endeavor, and also what the expected returns are.
The following sections discuss some of the main issues that need to be addressed before making a decision to move ahead.
Cost Versus Return
"What costs are you talking about? This software is free." is a reasonable question here. Well, you still have to put in the time and effort to actually build the site, even if osCommerce, and other related technologies like Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all free. Don't forget that your live site will also have to be hosted somewhere, although this is generally not a huge expense, and you will also need to buy a domain. Remember too, that you need the hardware on which you develop the site, even if ultimately it will be held on the Internet Service Provider's hard disks.
There are other expenses that are not really obvious at this stage. What will you do if you want to accept credit card payments on your site? How will you ensure the absolute security and privacy of those details? The best answer to this, for small to medium businesses, is not to handle them at all. This doesn't mean you are doomed to not accept credit card payments until you run a large multinational, but it does mean that a secure, third-party credit card payment facility will need to be involved, and with it, some expenses. As a matter of interest, we will look at the different methods for obtaining payments in Chapter 7.
Of course, monetary expense is not the only form of cost involved in this equation. You will also have to dedicate some time to building and maintaining the site. Determine now whether or not this time could be utilized better in doing other things. A big factor in deciding this, is ensuring you have a good idea of the hours required for the project. If time is not something you have in abundance, then it may be worth the expense to get a professional to build an osCommerce site for the business instead.
This leads on to the next point, which is that it may not be critical to have a site built immediately. If your business relies on word of mouth or is in its infancy, then it may be more fruitful spending time developing your client base and simply putting up an informative placeholder on the Web as opposed to a full-blown retail enterprise. Be certain that having an e-commerce site will enhance your business in the near future rather than drain resources from other more immediate concerns. The flipside is that by obtaining a sophisticated and professional online presence you might well get the head start before your competitors.
While the goal of most computing is to automate tasks to make things easier, it doesn't automatically mean that we can upload a website and leave it to haul in cash. Unfortunately, things don't really work like this, so deciding to have an online division of your business requires a constant commitment if not quite a full-time one. Much attention needs to be given to operational sites because there are a host of things that can go awry if left unsupervised. For example, it is quite likely that you will need to track how and what your site is doing and selling on a regular basis. This alone means you will probably have to build in some form of reporting to monitor your stock and sales.
Of course, if the business in question is not already a well-known one, then making it more visible to potential customers, alas, requires more resources and time. We will look at how to use various advertising and marketing channels and tricks in order to raise the profile of your site in Chapter 12. For now though, suffice to say that you can expect to spend further time and probably money on capturing a larger client base.
There are plenty of other issues that arise from owning an online retail business, and it is up to you to identify as many of them as possible in order to determine whether you will be able to maintain a steady level of commitment to the site. This time-commitment can be reduced substantially by ensuring that sufficient planning has gone in before site development begins.