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Can You Afford to Sell on the Net?

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000 

Okay; you have a small business, or perhaps you'd just like to have one. Part of your marketing strategy involves being on the Internet. Given today's climate in Canada, if all you want to put up is an informational Web site, say one that describes your service(s) or product(s), that's not too difficult to manage. Getting a domain name is easy and with deregulation it isn't expensive (about $15 Canadian). Finding someone to host your site is relatively easy, too (although admittedly it's easier in large cities than in small towns). 

The software exists to help you get your Web site started and you can make the site as complicated or as simple as you want.

However, if you also plan to sell products through your site — and particularly if you want to be able to accept credit card transactions — none of what you've been through up to this point will do you a darn bit of good.

As of earlier this year, for example, the Bank of Montreal's MasterCard had authorized just seven — count 'em, seven — merchants for all of Canada allowed to take what the credit companies call "card not present" transactions.

The Royal Bank was a lot better, with merchants numbering in the hundreds as of last count. But to get authorized, you need a year's standard transactions through a branch first, then an approval process, then the fees start for setup, monthly maintenance and a per-transaction fee.

Otherwise, the practice has been to charge anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 as a deposit to the credit card company of your choice.

The banks aren't worried so much that you'll misuse people's credit card numbers, although they do have concerns over security. Instead, they want to make sure you actually deliver the goods you've promised to sell.
Any way you slice it, though, it's very hard to get bank authorization to take credit cards through a Web site — and that all by itself may account for why over 60 per cent of the money Canadians spend online goes to US Web sites.

Other Alternatives

Depending on your Internet Service Provider, however, there are other alternatives — independent companies specializing in real-time credit card authorization. One of the largest in the world, InternetSecure, is located in Brampton. Another is E-xact, run by Multiactive Software out of Vancouver — the same people who publish the Maximizer contact management program.

This week, I'm going to take a closer look at another of MultiActive's products that you'll encounter just about everywhere that hosts business Web sites, EC Builder Pro 4.5. I'm looking at the $499 "Pro" version instead of the sometimes free (or $99) "standard" version, because frankly, the standard version isn't ready for prime time.
If you've had any experience at all trying to build an online "shopping cart" (something I've been working on for a local community group), you know that it can be a mind-numbing process — particularly if, like me, you've been immersing yourself in the wonders of the Perl programming language, writing Java scripts, playing with cascading style sheets, and all the other fun associated with trying to build something from the ground up. I'd reached the point with my project where I was scratching my head.

As a result, I was actually quite excited by the prospects offered by EC Builder Pro's promise that a user could "Sell on the Web in Under and Hour!"

Several hours later....

When you start EC Builder Pro, the first thing you get to do is to fill out 14 screens of information, covering everything you want to do with your Web site. The goal of the program is to help you set up a single-purpose Web site: to sell your goods. You can add three additional pages at this point, such as "About Us," "Contacts," or "Help," but nowhere from here on in is there any provision to incorporate any style you've already established for your site.

You'll be asked simple things like your company name, address and so on, and the program is quite insistent that you leave nothing crucial out. Sometimes, however, it goes overboard, and won't let you progress until you've, for example, told it whether the site builder's salutation should be Mr., Miss, Mrs., or whathaveyou. (Can you spell "OverKill?").

You can pick one of 15 different business types that best describes yours, and those can be broken down into further categories. You can add your company slogan and a brief description, up to 100 additional pages (but all you add here is headline and a brief description of the content). You describe the currency used for orders from your site (sorry, one choice only) and both whether you can accept credit cards and if so, which ones.

When we get to the catalogue selections, plan to give up most of a day or perhaps more than one day to complete it unless you already have a catalogue of items in a database somewhere else. ECBuilder Pro lets you import comma delimited ASCII (pure text) files that hopefully your database allows you to create. Otherwise, you'll have to enter each item manually. You can describe your catalogue by categories (and each can have a discount rate applied across the board and its own image). You can describe the discrete items in each category with a name, a price and a brief (not to exceed 79 characters) description. If there are more details, you can also add on separate screens, the model number, SKU/reference number, a longer description, and an image.

On subsequent product screens, you can add bulleted points of description, dimensions and weight, promotional pricing, list pricing, special tax provisions, shipping conditions... I get exhausted just thinking about it.
With all of this detail, however, the folks at Multiactive have acknowledged that there are problems. For example, the field for image addresses is too short for long pathnames, there's no way to cross-reference an item in several categories unless you add it several times in each (example, a product could be a book, but also new and/or popular and/or science fiction and/or hardcover). There's also no way to program or add up discounts based on volume (example, $1.25 each, or five for $5.00).

Just when you've completed this part (give yourself a pat on the back), there are only five screens to go (really!).

You can create a top and bottom page banner and/or hit counter (but only if you already know the script needed to create one — ECBuilder Pro doesn't supply one). You specify what information you want to capture on the order form (we're not there yet). You pick a style (none of them terribly exciting, but better than nothing if you're bereft of ideas — and because there's no provision for the program to pick up your existing style...). You can set up the security aspects of your site, including providing a digital signature (no, these aren't free — either you or your customer has to pay organizations such as VeriSign, Thwate, or GlobalSign — but Multiactive provides links to them). You can submit your site to a long list of search engines.

Then, last but not least, you get to save your work (sure hope nothing happened to your work on the catalogue while you were snoozing). Go away for a while; building the site takes a long time, even on a system with a 500 MHz Pentium III processor and lots of memory.

Once that's done, I hope you have an FTP program and know how to use it, because EC Builder Pro doesn't provide any way to publish your site to the Net.

Are we there yet?

When a customer hits your completed site, chooses products, then goes to complete their order, they don't do it on your site. Although you've paid for the ECBuilder Pro software, it isn't a complete solution on its own. The actual CGI (common gateway interface) scripts that handle the order processing are at MultiActive's ecOrderDesk site. And to take those credit cards, you'll have to sign up with either E-xact or InternetSecure, as well. At each step in the process, you'll get dinged a fee, for signing up, for monthly maintenance, and for processing each transaction — and of course, Multiactive's advertising for their products is all over the order site.

Multiactive's answer to my complaints was to acknowledge them. Many of them, they say, will be addressed in version 5.0 coming any day now, real soon. The same with a promised "Developer's Edition" that will put the CGI scripts (and the ability to process orders) in the users' hands.

Essentially what ECBuilder Pro 4.5 does is to create the front end of an online-store. I didn't think any of the designs was particularly attractive, and you have to leaf through a few pages before you can order items from separate categories. Having to leave the merchant's site to process the order has to leave customers puzzled about who it is they're really ordering merchandise from, too.

I'd wait for the newer versions before sinking a lot of time into this one.

More info

Multiactive Software: www.multiactive.com, 1-888-370-6193. EC Builder Pro 4.5: $499 Cdn. E-xact prices range from an annual fee of $499 to $585, plus a one-time setup fee, plus monthly fees, plus per-transaction fees.

InternetSecure: 1-800-297-9482 outside of Metro Toronto, 905-338-2929 in Metro Toronto, email: sales@internetsecure.com for applicable rates. "Services start at $295."

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