Tony Sarno20 February 2007, 10:18 PM
Finally, the big day arrived: we launched Geek Gear. Luke Amery, managing director of NetMerchant, the store's developer and hosting provider, describes the run-up to the launch
Luke Amery describes what our partners NetMerchant went through to flick the switch on Geek Gear.
Products are obviously an integral part of the Geek Gear site. The APC articles contain a lot of the process we went through to arrive at our catalogue.
However, the next round of fun begins when you have figured out what you are selling (most people contemplating an online store fortunately already have this part figured out!). Next we needed to actually present what we were selling on the website. To make them attractive we essentially needed two things; some high quality images and some witty geeky descriptions.
We actually attempted to do some of the photography ourselves to try and keep costs down but the results were terrible. The photos you see on the site were all taken professionally in a "white sheet" environment with the fancy silver umbrellas. Photography is potentially one of those false economy things. You can think you are saving money by doing it yourself, but if you are turning people away by not presenting a quality image then perhaps the point is being missed.
With descriptions, fortunately we have some geek -inclined writing talent on hand at APC. So we set to work on the product highlights - the short descriptions in the category pages. I quite like the results - the geek humour is there and I don't think it crossed the "try-hard" line but I guess you have to be the judge of that.
The next steps were to start filling out the more detailed descriptions that appear on the product pages. We asked our suppliers for some of that info and it is slowly trickling in so you will see a lot of the gadgets and hats have already been updated. This is a work in progress.
The actual site design presented some challenges. We took the designs from Avalde (previously Amok Creative) which were presented as layered photoshop files. So it was up to us to convert the art work to html that we could put into the NetMerchant eCommerce framework.
This may have been another false economy decision. The benefit of having the designer do the "chop-up" is that they are confronted with any issues that make the design unwieldy in html form directly. Not only that, but designers end up doing that sort of work day in day out, they probably would have been more efficient than us. So the end result of the website design, while we were happy with it, had to have some compromises from the original art.
For example, the left navigation area was supposed to have a fluid rounded joiner to the main area which was quite impressive - and you can all now see that hit the cutting room floor.
The way the site comes together in this sort of project at NetMerchant is straight forward once the designs are done. We have a broad set of relatively fixed (but comprehensive and configurable) functionality in the underlying engine so the job becomes mapping designs to that functionality. This requires programmer effort, in this case it took us a little over two weeks of time at the keyboard to go from a standard template to the current result. We are continuing to put development effort into the site as there were some "nice to haves" that we still think are worth doing, so stay tuned.
The next thing our attention turned to was freight. We wanted to ensure that postage and handling could be made as accurate as possible for our customers. In our opinion there is nothing worse than getting that checkout shock when the total goes from reasonable to put it out of your mind as you move from cart to checkout. We selected Australia Post parcel services as our carrier as we don't have any perculiar time constraints and the products are not particularly bulky (Australia Post has a 20Kg limit).
Ideally, the freight calculation is determined online as part of a customer placing an order online. The NetMerchant eCommerce framework provides us with this capability. Freight can be made as simple or as complicated as a business requires, in this case we went for moderately complicated to try and match actual costs. The other model is the "swings and roundabouts" approach where you place a single simple cost on freight that on average keeps you in the black. It is really important to get freight calculations right as it can be the difference between making money and not.
We also decided to offer a freight discount - we haven't found a place to describe our offer on the site yet, we'll be adding it shortly. It was decided that we could offer orders that totalled over $100 freight free unless a weight charge was applied (for large interstate or international orders). You can test it out by placing enough things in the shopping cart to exceed the $100 boundary and going into the checkout, you should see the standard freight service drop to $0 if you qualify. Our intention with this strategy is obviously to try and have our customers add that other item they were contemplating on the current order they are placing.
To show off more of the freight flexibility we decided to offer two services - an Australia Post Standard and Express service. You can choose which you want in the checkout as you complete the order, the Express service obviously costing more.
We also added calculation numbers for International deliveries - we opted for a relatively high number here as we aren't expecting much overseas trading and that high number allows us to cover a lot of the world without adding discrete costs for absolutely everywhere.
Another aspect of the site to have completed before going live is having the necessary business information published. In our opinion having a prominent "Contact Us" area is a good way to ensure that people can actually make contact in the case that something goes wrong. The "Red Tape" - our terms and conditions are also something important to think about. These things while unglamorous to most geeks are another potential way to establish a level of trust with the customer.
Since Geek Gear is a transactional site that accepts credit cards it is an absolute necessity to secure communications between the web browser and the web server with SSL encryption technology. We have an Extended Validation SSL certificate on order (we are currently using the NetMerchant wildcard certificate - you will notice the domain name switch to geekgear.netmerchant.com.au when you go through the checkout). When the EV SSL certificate arrives the whole eCommerce experience will be conducted under the www.geekgear.com.au domain, this is another trust building step. Additionally, the EV SSL certificate will make the address bar go green - you can't get more trustworthy than that now can you? To our knowledge we will be one of the first Australian sites to be validated for such an SSL certificate.
We launched the site at 6:30am on Monday after an all-nighter something that I think most geeks can appreciate, we hope you enjoy it, it was fun putting it together.