Since moving to Australia and working with clients to get the maximum from their ecommerce platforms, I have found that here at least, there are many questions on how to get started or move to the next level with ecommerce of any scale. In this 6 part series, I outline the simple steps to make sure you have a great foundation for your ecommerce platform.

This blog series is not going to tell you what you should sell — that part is up to you: it is about getting to the next level and making your venture a reality.

Step 6 – The outside world

Third Party Integrations are a sure fire way (of course, you have to choose the right third party) to extend your reach while leveraging off another’s platform. There are many third party integrations that can come in useful. Here a few of these:

eBay

One third party that our clients have had great success using is eBay. The ability to tap into such a large market of customers looking for products is fundamental. If you have just setup an online presence, it is a great way to build awareness of your products among people who are not likely to look for your URL.

It also opens up markets far and wide around the world, and if you have the right fulfilment setup you should be able to tap into the international market via a single integration.

If you have a large numbers of products like some of our clients, you are able to use the eBay Large Merchant services. We've been able to use this with clients who've had 6 million + products on eBay at once.

For smaller setups, it is possible to simplify the integration by using the standard eBay APIs to push products, manage stock and receive and process orders. The process is very straightforward and if the fulfilment is setup correctly, no changes should need to be made at all.

Google Product / Base

A good and free way of making your products available to a wider audience is an integration with Google Product (or Base or whatever Google are calling it once you're reading this). It's a service which will upload all your products to Google and make it aware of their existence, and the integration is simple. Google will quality check your feed and make sure that you are updating it regularly and once listed, your products will show high up in Google’s search results.

Westfield

The shopping centre group has their own website which allows retailers to integrate their store stock with the retailer, selling product in a similar way to the way eBay do. Westfield do have some quality requirements, so it's is not as easy as eBay to get going, but they do provide an opportunity to leverage off another’s brand to get more sales.

This brings to an end the 6 steps to get started in ecommerce: I hope that people find it useful. There are many other facets that are required in moving to the next steps but if you've taken anything from these first 6 steps, you should be well on your way.

A few ideas for next steps once you have the basis of an ecommerce site:

Store Integrations (if you have a store network) such as:

1. Reserve online, pickup in store
2. Viewing in store events
3. Personal Shopping bookings
4. Allow customers to thank / query stores directly

Social Interaction

1. Get customers interacting via a blog
2. Have commentary on new items coming in store
3. Allow customers to view sneak peaks of upcoming products

Loyalty Programs

Mobile Developments (apps / mobile version of the website)

Croudsourcing new product ideas

These are just a few ideas, you may have more. We certainly do – why not get in touch now so we can make something magic together.