Thought will need to be given to support service availability on a world-wide time zone (Australia for example) and how you will deal with cultural differences in some instances.
You also need to begin to think about building "electronic" relationships with your customers as individuals. Without doubt this is the future of e-commerce. Those that succeed will provide their customers with "warm glows" in the transaction and post sales periods. This means lots of email contact that will help to reassure customers that the vendor is "real", possibly providing a periodic email newsletter that they can subscribe to, and dealing very promptly with their email enquiries, certainly providing a response within 24 hours. The purpose here is to tie customer loyalty to point at which they consider you their friend, to build your company as their brand preference, because they will have the ability to exercise that preference on a world-wide basis.
Conclusions
This outline of some of the issues around e-commerce should have helped clients to decide how to approach the subject. It is complex, and raises many questions for client businesses to address.
We firmly believe that client e-commerce sites should develop organically and slowly, building on strong foundations and we are happy to discuss your particular requirements with you.
Because there are so many options and variables, it is not possible to provide costing indications on a generalised basis. We need to discuss your specific requirements before we can estimate site costs for real-time e-commerce.
Please let us know if you want to talk about it.
