E-Business Practice Client Intake Form
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1. IS THE PURPOSE OF THE WEBSITE ONLY E COMMERCE, OR WILL THERE BE PAGES SUPPORTING OTHER ASPECTS OF THE BUSINESS?
This is important because it not only influences design, but also the development of the site. It’s important to consider your site’s underlying architecture. Will there be supporting pages, like an about us page, a privacy policy, or terms and conditions? How about a blog? Getting the answers to this question early on in the process will help establish the framework from the start and define the full scope of the project.
2. WHAT WILL YOU BE SELLING ONLINE? (E.G.PRODUCTS THAT SHIP, ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS, SERVICES, ETC.)
Same goes for digital versions of books. Physical products that ship add a different wrinkle, as your store has to calculate shipping costs, and you have to store and ship the physical items to complete the transaction. You also have to manage inventory (we’ll touch on that more later). Electronic products and services require special attention, as you have to determine the delivery method and format (direct from the page or via email), all of which will influence how your e commerce site functions.
3. ROUGHLY HOW MANY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS OR SERVICES WILL YOU BE SELLING ONLINE?
Or, more simply put, will your eCommerce site’s footprint be small or large? The number of products and services you sell directly relates to the number of pages you’ll need, the number of  Les, and the size of the database. A large site with a lot of different products is going to have a huge footprint and should be accounted for at the start of the project. That is also going to in hence the amount of storage and other architectural components.
4. WILL THESE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES BE SEPARATED INTO DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OR SUBCATEGORIES?
A. If so, roughly how many? Examples I. Women’s clothing <category> 1. Shirts <subcategory> 2. Shoes <subcategory> ll.Men’s clothing lll. Children's clothing. It’s important to set up a site structure that allows two things: (1) easy categorization of your products, and (2) easy navigation of your products for your customers.Think of it this way: If they can’t  find it, they can’t buy it. Logical categories and subcategories help you know where your products are, and also help your customers navigate them. They also make it easier to showcase related products, which could entice shoppers to purchase more items.
5. WILL THESE PRODUCTS HAVE “ATTRIBUTES” (E.G. A SINGLE “T-SHIRT” IN RED, BLUE, OR GREEN, AND SMALL, MEDIUM, OR LARGE)?
A. If so, do you need the website to keep separate track of stock based on these attributes? Attributes are like an additional layer beneath product categories and subcategories. Now that we know how your products are sorted, how does each individual product vary? Some common examples are sizes and colors. If you sell t-shirts, each color and each size would represent a unique SKU, despite all being the same product category.
6. ARE ANY PRODUCTS CUSTOMIZED FOR THE CLIENT (E.G. A T-SHIRT OR PEN WITH THE COMPANY NAME OR LOGO)?
While this is pretty straightforward, it requires an additional layer of programming, as the site likely requires a input a company name or unique text and an area to upload an image of a logo.
7. DO YOU HAVE EXISTING PHOTOGRAPHY FOR YOUR PRODUCTS?
A. Will your product manufacturers or distributors provide professional photography?The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is repeated  for a reason. Excellent photography is key to success. Great product photos help sell. It’s highly recommended to have professional product shots for every item you sell on your site, and from multiple angles. This creates a large number of  les and a huge demand on bandwidth, however, so it’s important to consider ways to compress product photos to ensure page speeds don’t sue under the weight of loading those beautiful product shots.
8. WILL YOU BE SHIPPING PRODUCT?
A. Will you need to charge shipping separately from the product? B. Which shipping methods would be the best  fit (you can choose more than one)? I. Exact shipping costs through a real time direct link with a shipper such as USPS, Canada Post, UPS, FedEx II. Flat rate depending on location III. Free shipping over details (tracking number) to the client automatically? D. Do you require any special shipping cut off  times and dates? E. Which countries will you be shipping to?
Most often, people integrate their eCommerce store directly with the shipping companies (USPS, Canada Post, etc.) for live shipping rates based on product weight and location. All of these shipping companies have excellent APIs, and they’ll let you print a shipping label.Alternatively, providers like Ship Station, integrate with multiple shippers and can make this experience even easier. often recommends these for our customers. They also provide tracking numbers, which make for an improved experience.Flat rate shipping is also very popular. It’s easy for the customer to understand, and can often lead to increased total order value.Other considerations to make when it comes to shipping include:Will shipping be determined by weight, by dimensions, or both? If so, this is a lot of work, as each product will need this information added into the backed system. Also, do you offer free shipping after a certain dollar amount is spent? Is there free shipping across the board? Do certain items need to ship separately? Are there flat rates for specific parts of a country or city? All of this can be programmed in, but it needs to be specified, and it’s much easier to do this up front than to go back and update every detail to ensure shipping is calculated correctly.Another consideration is some services, say catering or food delivery, have cut o  times for ordering. So if your customers want an order, they need to place that order by a certain time the previous day.Lastly, you must determine if you will restrict shipping. Are you only going to ship products domestically? Or will you ship internationally? Are there certain states or countries where you won’t or can’t ship your items? All of this plays into how your site is programmed to work. Shipping should never be an afterthought for an eCommerce store.
9. WILL YOU NEED TO CHARGE SALES OR OTHER TAX SEPARATELY FOR THE ITEMS? IF SO, PLEASE DESCRIBE THE TAX RULES.
Taxes are a huge piece of eCommerce, yet it is still somewhat of a gray area and a place governments need to do some work. Today, the web is the wild west, with very few eCommerce stores charging sales tax or other taxes, aside from big corporations like Amazon. The EU has started crafting regulations and has formed a body for accepting taxes. However, unless your country has a treaty with the EU, you’re not obliged to follow this. So, most people charge for their country, yet don’t charge tax for anything outside.To correctly build an eCommerce site, an agency has to know where and how you want to charge tax so it can setup the tax tables and reporting to make sure you’re in compliance with the correct tax laws.
10. DO YOU HAVE AN EXISTING MERCHANT ACCOUNT OR ONLINE PAYMENT GATEWAY?
This is super important. The two most popular gateways, Stripe and PayPal, are free with Woo Commerce, and provide your customers an easy, familiar, and secure way to pay for items bought from your store. Additional gateways can be  extensions library likely has what you need.Payment gateways provide an alternative payment option for customers cautious about sharing their credit card info with every site they purchase from. They can store that info securely with a service like PayPal. Letting your agency know up front that you plan to use an online payment gateway ensures this is properly setup from the beginning.As part of this, you’ll have to ask the client how important it is for their customers to stay on their site when checking out versus jumping to a third-party site like PayPal to finalize the transaction. This is really up to the client’s preference, and is mostly a UX issue.
11. DO YOU SELL SERVICES OR PRODUCTS THAT REQUIRE REGULAR RECURRING BILLING?
A. Other than the initial order, does this recurring billing need to be self-managed by the client through the website?This really pertains to subscription sites and licensing purchases. Recurring billing requires the payment provider to do additional work, and also requires the addition of the Subscriptions module from Woo Commerce. We’ve seen a lot of sites move toward subscription models lately, so this is sure to come up in initial conversations.
12. DO YOU NEED TO PRESENT CERTAIN PRODUCTS, PRICES, DISCOUNTS, OR CONTENT TO SPECIFIC VISITORS, SUCH AS CUSTOMERS, WHOLESALERS, RETAILERS, OR DISTRIBUTORS?
Sometimes store owners offer discounts to wholesalers. From a development perspective, we can add discounts based on a user’s account type. From there, these discounts are often a fixed percentage off, say 20 percent, or they’re taken off on a per item basis.Somewhat similar to specific discounts, are there layers, or categories, of customers? Or perhaps you want to offer some products only to wholesalers and some only to end-users. All of this can be accomplished—just make sure you make it clear ahead of time what you’re looking to accomplish.
13. DO YOU NEED TO TRACK LIMITS ON ITEMS BEING SOLD (E.G. INVENTORY OR SPACES AVAILABLE IN A CLASS)?
A. Do you need your website to indicate items out of stock, class full, etc.? B. Do you want to allow back ordering or waiting lists? This is another big one for physical retailers. What level of inventory management do you require? Is stock displayed to the customer (e.g. will they see if an item is out of stock)? More importantly, do you o er back-orders so visitors can still purchase an out of stock item? Then there’s the question of having a waiting list for a hot item, or a notification when an item is back in stock.
14. DO YOU NEED YOUR E COMMERCE STORE TO INTEGRATE WITH ANY OTHER EXISTING SYSTEMS? AND IF SO, WHICH ONES?
A. Accounting system B. Inventory system C. Client management system D. Marketing communications system. Integrations are a really big deal, and if you don’t plan for them or they are done incorrectly, it can truly damage your commerce business. Does your eCommerce site’s data need to sync with internal systems, like inventory management or accounting? Or email? Are you looking at Quick books, Sales-force, or Mail chimp. There are literally hundreds of integrations that can be made, many of which are critical to an eCommerce site’s overall success. If you don’t have a plan in place, an intelligent agency can walk you through your options before your site is live and help you select the best solution for your needs.
15. WILL YOU WANT TO IMPLEMENT AN AFFILIATE OR REFERRAL PROGRAM?
While pretty self-explanatory, it’s a necessary question. You have to have plans in place to pay a ligates for referrals, and you have to have an local program in place so your a ligates know what to expect. One popular option is Affiliate WP which features a ton of add-ons.
16. WHAT SORT OF REPORTING FOR FULFILLMENT DO YOU REQUIRE?
A. An email per order B. Manual review of orders in backed C. Daily pick list summary with printable shipping labels. This is often a task that can be forgotten but is incredibly important. This accounts for the emails that your customers receive when they place an order, you full that order, a customer abandons a shopping cart, and more. These types of emails are built into Woo Commerce by default, and you can customize the copy and the design to your specific needs. These emails, which also serve as a receipt, can be an excellent place to up sell or tell customers about other items they may be interested in.The same is true for internal notifications. How are you and your team noted of a purchase? How do you review orders? Do you receive an email, or is it a manual pull on the back end? Do you receive a summary with printable labels? This decision sets your work ow, so it’s an important one.
17. DO YOU REQUIRE YOUR SITE TO BE MULTILINGUAL?
You want your customers to have a localized experience, and not feel left out. You should investigate whether you need to serve your site in different languages. There are a host of services that will help you do this (WP Engine Geo IP is one).You can set your site to serve in a specific language based on city, state, country, even zip code, or any other parameters you see  t. You can also leverage a drop down menu through which visitors self-select their language preference or can change it.
18. DO YOU REQUIRE YOUR SITE TO ACCEPT MULTIPLE CURRENCIES?
A. Will currency be based on IP address? Or shipping address? B. Do you require a drop down to change the currency? C. Will currency be based on one price, e.g.: USD and then all others get a live rate? Or, will you fix the price in each currency (using no exchange rates). Just like supporting different languages, supporting different currencies is becoming more important in the eCommerce space. Customers will feel more comfortable buying in the currency they use most. There are a lot of variations that exist, but the main two ways are (1) fixing all prices in USD (or your base currency) and then use a live exchange rate to serve other currencies (2) you set the prices for each currency individually, meaning if you set an item’s price at $10 USD, then it’s $12 CAD, and so on. In the second example, exchange rates are not factored in, so prices may have to be changed manually if they  actuate too far one way or the other.Furthermore, you must determine which factors will use which currency a customer sees. Will it be based on IP address? Shipping address? Or some other factor entirely? Will this be automatic, or will visitors select their currency preference? And if so, can they change their currency?There is a lot to consider here.
19. DO YOU REQUIRE US TO IMPORT OR MIGRATE OLD DATA TO YOUR NEW SITE?
This has the potential to be a big job, depending on the size of the site you’re migrating. For the average eCommerce store, a full migration requires importing all of the data, such as customer data, order data, product data, images, and myriad other things. Do you have backups in place? What platform are you moving from?An eCommerce site can have a large footprint, so there’s a lot to move. There are tools that can help, but setting expectations at the start and can make for a smooth migration.
20. WHERE ARE YOU HOSTING YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE?
Now that you’ve broken down what your client needs for their site, you have to determine where it’s going to live. Does your client have the time and the resources to host it themselves? Will you provide the hosting? Or does the site need the help of a hosting provider? Where a site is hosted is imperative.For guaranteed availability, up time, support, and ease of use for your development team, a managed platform is the best choice--managed hosting providers handle the heavy lifting for you, and you can tap into their expertise if an issue arises. A good host makes sure the site is fast and is available when you need to scale up for planned, and sometimes unplanned, track spikes. A managed provider will also handle security, backups, and a whole lot more, ensuring your eCommerce site is a well-oiled machine. Plus, developers love a good host--it helps them focus on their work and arms them with the tools they need to do their job correctly the time, without worrying about server maintenance and troubleshooting.
21. HOW DOES YOUR HOST HANDLE CACHING?
For speed and sociability, you’ll want your site to be cached, but eCommerce sites add some trickiness to caching. Once you’ve selected a host for a client’s eCommerce site, understanding their caching rules and making the appropriate adjustments will ensure smooth sales sailing.
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