Joining the electronic marketplace

The vendor will expect you to provide some level of support—such as staff to help with the implementation—and will quote a price and timeline that is partly based on what you provide. If you don’t provide the support as promised and as expected, getting the e-commerce site up and running can be painfully slow.

But while providing help is important, so is something less solid—the ability to make decisions about what you want your platform to do. You will have to make decisions quickly and confidently. This is important, because advanced e-commerce systems require a great deal of configuration about things such as which users are allowed to do what things, what products are to sold to which markets and the requirements for how orders will be filled.

This means that you must have someone on hand who is familiar with the company’s business processes and who has the authority to make the decisions that will support the implementation. Without that person, things can go badly wrong.

“The most important thing, when getting into international e-commerce,” says Chad Hooker of Elastic Path, “is to thoroughly understand your business, where you are trying to go, what you sell and what your growth plans are. If you have the right platform, the right partners and the right set of capabilities, your business can grow very quickly, so you need to be prepared. Because that’s the goal of moving e-commerce across borders—to grow your business and find new markets for your products.”