About your products and sales

• Are your products "one off" items - once sold, there isn't another?
• Do your products have differing lead times, and do you need to handle this?
• Do you have options on your products (e.g. Colour, size)
• Do you have personalised products that require a user input (e.g. engraved initials)
• Do you have some products that naturally "lead" to others - e.g. order a printer and you'll want cables and toners too.
• Do you sell any items by weight / length, or have any limits on quantities ordered?
• How many different products do you offer for sale?
• How many line items are there on a particular order?
• How many orders would you hope to receive in a typical day?
• Are there likely to be very busy peak days (e.g. the day something new goes on sale)?

Restricted Products and security

• Do you sell some (or all) products to adults only (adult material, knives, solvents, etc)?
• Do you sell products that cannot be supplied to certain countries?
• Do you wish to validate the orderer's email address / other information?
• Can you anticipate a proportion of malicious orders (you're unlikley to get many if you sell cleaning products, but you will if you sell sex aids)
• Will you deliver only to a registered credit card address?

Shipping and costs

• Do you accept orders only from your immediate area?
• Do you accept orders country wide?
• Do you accept orders from elsewhere in the EU?
• Do you accept orders from None-EU countries?
• Do you charge shipping?
• How do you work out shipping charges?
• Do shipping charges differ depending on the order value?
• Do certain items incur special extra (or lower) shipping charges?
• Do shipping charges differ depending on the speed of shipping requested?
• Do shipping charges differ depending on the final destination?
• Are your standard shipping charges "Mainland Only"?
• Are more distant shipping charges calculatable, "at cost" or "by negotiation"?
• Do prices vary depending on postcode?
• Can orders be collected from you?

Currencies

• Do you accept payment in only your local currency?
• Do you want to accept multiple currencies (e.g. Euro, Pound, USD)
• Do you keep a separate set of prices for each item in each currency?
• Do you wish to convert the final invoice value to the user's selected currency?
• Do you want to update prices based on currency fluctation daily, weekly, monthly or rarely?

Discounts

• Do you offer quantity discounts?
• Do you offer discounts based on total order value?
• Do you offer discounts to specific customers?
• Do you require to enter special "one off" pricing?
• Do you let your customers bid for items?
• Do you do specials such as "buy 1, get one half price"?
• Do you do specials such as "buy x and get y at half price"?

Tax

• Are you VAT registered?
• Do you charge VAT at differening rates, or are all your products at a single rate?
• Do the prices you wish to quote include VAT / do you want to quote both with and without VAT?
• Do you make deliveries outside the EU which are send VAT free?

About your name

• Do you have a registered domain name that you wish to use?
• If "no" - Do you know if the name you want is available?
• If "yes" - is it at a suitable service provider

About your web pages and web site

• Do you want to run your web site in your own office?
• Do you want to integrate into an existing web site?
• If you take offline orders and have stock levels on your web site, will you update the web site at each order offline or in batches?
• What do you want to do if something goes out of stock?
• Do you work from a catalog that you want to automatically reflect, or from individual product information?
• How long do you want products to remain in a provisional order if the site user goes away?
• Do you want your site registered with search engines?
• Do you want your individual pages to be indexed by the search engines?

For the more technical

(Answers only if you are going to be technically involved rather than outsourcing all the work to a third party)
• Do you want to be hosted on a Unix/Linux or NT system?
• Do you want your scripts in Perl, PHP, Java or something else?
• Do you want to store data in text files, Relational Database or XML?
• Any thoughhts on cookies, hidden fields, or URL rewriting, or want advice?

Collecting orders off the system

• Do you want to receive each order by email as it is placed?
• Do you want orders to be batched up to collect when you choose?
• Do you want orders to be batched at a certain time of day?
• Do you want to collect orders by email or from a web site?

Partials

• Do you ship partial orders or wait for the order to be complete?
• Do you ship only what is available and have your customers re-order other goods?
• Do you have a "substitute nearest" scheme?

Returning customers

• Do you want to identify returning customers?
• Do you want returning customers to be able to log in?
• How are you going to check that it really is them / can they remember passwords?
• Do you want to keep "favourite" lists for returning customers?

Methods of payment

• Do you want to accept on line credit card details via a secured link?
• Do you want on line checking of credit card details with you card service supplier?
• Do you want to retain details for future orders?
• Do you want to ship only to the registered address of the cardholder?
• Do you want to offer non-secure credit card ordering?
• Do you want to offer ordering on account for regular customers?
• Do you want on line credit account application?
• Do you want to allow users to generate an order on line, print it and fax or post it to you?
• Do you want to allow users paying by cheque to print their order and post their cheque?
• Do you want to provide COD (Cash on Delivery) terms?
• Do you want the system to be used to prepare costings / quotations / estimates?
• Do you want to be able to black list (people) or red line (exclude orders from certain areas)?

On line tracking

• Do you want to send email confirmation of order receipt?
• Do you want to provide on line order tracking?
• Do you want to send emails confirming dispatch?
• Do you want payment / account tracking on line?

Customer updates

• Do you want to maintain mailing lists of customers for special offers?
• Do you want to send a survey to customers a month after they order?

Linking to other systems

• Do you want to move online orders into an accounting system?
• Do you want to move online orders into an order handling system?
• Do you want to import product information from elsewhere?
• Do you want to share data of pages with other online systems(s)?

Support

• Do you want assistance available to answer questions? Within 48 hoours? 24 hours? 8 hours? 5, 6 or 7 days a week?
• Do you want that assistance to have the resource to sort any crisis for you, or would you look just for advice?

About your involvement

• Do you want to write your entire web site yourself?
• Do you want to write you web pages but have someone else write the programs?
• Do you want someone else do do all the setup, but you take over day to day maintenance?
• Do you want someone to do all the setup and the day to day maintenance?

And finally

• When do you want to start taking orders through this system?
• Do you have a budget in mind?

• Questions about your requirement
• Possible solutions for you
  
  
• Looking for someone to help put your shop together?
• Looking for someone to train you to write your own shopping application?
  
  
• Online Ordering Software - home page