 I'm Dave Cowan. I'm a local CPA here. I have spent 25, 30 years working on software implementations, business consulting. Right now I specialize with e-commerce sites and point of sale systems and any point of sale system that might be integrated with e-commerce. So when my clients come to me after they have their site set up or they've opened the store, we start dealing with the issues of actually running the business. And what we've found is a lot of things that needed to have been decided up front or planned for during that website design were not taken to account. So what they want to do is going to be very difficult based on what they're working with. So I'll have a quick question. How many designers, website designers, do we have that deal with e-commerce? Okay, and how many are here that are thinking or have an e-commerce site themselves that are, all right, because this can go in two different directions so I'll try to keep it in the middle for you. But what happens is you need to plan for a lot of things. If you're designing or you're thinking about starting an e-commerce site, there's a lot of things that you probably don't even know that you're going to have to deal with down the road. What I want to do is give you some information, let you give you some ideas of what to talk to your customer about when they come to you for an e-commerce site. And that way you get, if we're not going to implement certain things such as major fulfillment and inventory management and all of that up front, you at least know that that might be the direction they're headed. So you can go ahead and plan for that. So we'll go ahead and the business model is what is going to decide that. We'll give you, this is my definition. You can Google business models and if you get 2,000 hits, you'll get 2,000 definitions. So, but it describes how a business is going to create, deliver, and importantly capture the value of what they're doing here. And it comes before a business plan. Once you have your model down, your business plan then gets into the details. How I'm, what are my margins? How much money are going to make the expenses? How am I marking? That starts laying it out. The business plan is the basis for how you're going to design that site. It also dictates where your time, your funds, and if your personal time are going to get allocated to those specific points of your plan. Right now there are three quote business models that are considered with e-commerce sites. You have the business to business. You have business to consumer. And they also have consumer to consumer. We are not going to deal with the last one. If it's consumer to consumer, send them to Craigslist or eBay. That's where you need to be because that is not a true business. You are running a business and you're either selling to other businesses or you're selling to consumers. So we're not even going to deal with the last one there. Get something to move here. This is what the current in the business world, this is the current canvas or the structure of a business model. The information you need to think about. It's extremely complicated and it takes a lot of time to go through and truly think through these. We're not going to go through these. Just going over this slide is a three-day conference. Y'all don't want to hear it and I will fall asleep before we get through it. But you want to deal with your key partners, your key activities. What is this site going to do? What is my business going to do? The activities. What resources do I need? What resources do I need from my suppliers? From myself for funds and time. Things of that nature. The value proposition. I'm sure you've heard value stressed in a lot of these other sessions the past two days. Jason Blumber yesterday on value pricing. You have to apologize. I apologize. I will be louder. What you have to determine is and talk to your customer. They want to sell something. What you have to think of is why do you want to sell that? What benefit is it bringing to your customer? Does your customer want to buy it? Usually two things are the reason a customer is going to buy something. They have a pain or a problem and they want to solve that. Or they want some additional pleasure is that either one is not because they woke up one day and say they just click the button and buy something just out of the blue. Don't care. The customer relations. How are you going to find those customers? How are you going to deal when you start getting inquiries about products? You get questions about your orders. You get questions about refunds. You have to make sure that you have the resources and you have the facilities built into these sites or through another means. You can use third-party help desk like Zendesk, Fresh Desk has a free system. A lot of those will integrate right into your WooCommerce, Shopify, any of those e-commerce sites. But you've got to think about how you're going to deal with a customer, deal with complaints. You will have them. What channels are you going to market to? And this is not only just which customers. What market are you going into? What niche in that market are you going into? Are you going to sell on multiple channels? Are we going to set up a WooCommerce site and also have eBay, Amazon, maybe Shopify, where you're taking your products but you're marketing them to different segments of the market? If you do that, how are you going to consolidate all of these orders? How are you going to keep track of your inventory that's allocated among these channels? That also hits the customer segments, the cost structure. Think about what it's going to cost to run this thing. You know what you want to sell your products for. You know what they're probably going to cost you. But also remember, there's going to be some time and cost in getting these things shipped, accepting returns when they come back. Website hosting, business registration. I mean, you need to think through all your costs. You don't want to think that you're going to get a 20% margin on your products. But then when you add in all the other costs, you're losing money. Honestly, we're all here to make money. And that you need to know what your margins are there. And we'll get into it when we get into some of the financial reporting. But I will say this, you don't want to concentrate on your revenue. You know, you could have $500,000 in sales, you could have $50 billion in sales, $50 billion in sales. And you don't want to focus on your profit. You don't want to focus on your company's file for bankruptcy just like everybody else. Focus on your profit. Focus on your bottom line. Everything else will fall in line with that. Your pricing, your revenue, your call structures. But if you're going to do this, and you're going to do it as a non-profit, more power to you. But I think all of us in here need to make a living, and we want to make a fair profit. But we want to do so where we're not now, let's see, we can get this. When a lot of customers come to me, they have their website, they say, this is my business. My business is my website. Well, I'm afraid that's not necessarily the case. It also includes the inventory management, your fulfillment. Don't forget about sales tax compliance, which is just a different ring of hell all into itself. You got to have content, you got to have a social media strategy. How are you procuring those items from your suppliers? How are you handling your financial reporting? You're probably going to have to report sales tax. How do you do that? To whom do you do that? At the end of the year, you're going to have to file your income taxes. So you need some way of knowing this is how much money I made. This is my revenue. These were my expenses. This is my net income, hopefully. Sometime, first couple years, you might be running a net loss, but you know, don't worry, but you got to figure out some way to get this on a tax return without spending months and months of sorting through orders and bank statements and everything else. But all of these interrelate. This is like an ecosystem or organism. There are no two businesses that are exactly the same. You could have two individuals selling the exact same thing on the exact same channels, such as WooCommerce, but those businesses might be run completely different. They're like children. You know, each one is going to be individual. Each one has its own needs, its own issues. And it being like a child or an ecosystem, one small change in one component is possibly going to have a ripple effect and change everything else down the line. Not each one of these is standing alone or on its own island. I refer to it as the Rubik's Cube. You change one little thing. It doesn't change that one little side of the square. The whole thing's changed that point. Sometimes you could do it and fine tune it. Sometimes you can do it and completely break it and try to start from scratch. So that's I guess the most important thing is once you understand how your customer is going to run their business, not just what they're going to throw on their website to sell, that gives you a better understanding and how to design what to include in that that website. A lot of times as they start getting to these issues, you could find a plugin. I've run across some we got 75 plugins on that site and it takes five minutes to load just to take care of these issues here. That is not what you want. You want to have this information or the opportunity built into the site, whether it's implemented now or not. Even though the website, that is the foundation of their of the business. So if there's any flaws in this like a house or a building, as it grows, there's going to be issues going in as a ripple effect going forward. Right now some of the current trends as you're working with your customers in e-commerce and everybody that has issued is like opinions. Everybody has their top trends. Everybody has their what they say is going out. But right now is mobility. Those sites have to be mobile because most people are now shopping with their phones and that without that even Google is going to whack you without being mobile. A subset of that trend is they're taking away a lot of the nice features of the website. They're scaled down bare bones but they are extremely fast. They're mobile and they have tremendous search features if you're looking for something. That's one of the smaller trends that some of the major retailers are going to. Nowadays, the customers control. They're driving what you sell. They're driving your prices. They're driving how it's delivered to them. They're driving what the warranty, what the return policies are. You no longer get to dictate to the consumer or even to the business. They're telling you how they want to buy and buy. A lot of people are on multi-channel where again you might be selling on eBay, Shopify, Amazon. So there are multiple places to sell these products. You have to give that customer a reason to purchase from you. A lot of times now they're expecting loyalty programs. They don't necessarily expect you to automatically offer a discount, which I can go off on another rant on doing discounts, but they want loyalty. If you buy from me, all right, then, oh, your next order. We might give you a discount or we're going to let you get in on this special purchase. We have a limited number, but they want loyalty programs. One way of looking at that is special buyers club. You know, if they sign up for your newsletter, purchase a certain amount of or dollar amount of materials of product, then you're one of our VIPs and then you can offer them special pricing. People eat that up. If you can start something and it's exclusive, people don't really care what it is. It's the fact that it's exclusive and they're not in it. They're going to want to get in and they'll figure out what it takes to do it. The social discovery used to be people would Google the product or go straight out to Amazon to investigate something they want to purchase. One for reviews, one for pricing. They now head right to social media and see what is out there. They're looking for endorsements. It's one thing that you would want to have on your website for your products are reviews, comments. People, given the same item on two different websites, even the website with the lower price or the higher price, if there are reviews, people have made comments and ratings. They will buy from there because they trust it more as opposed to just here's my product, here's my great price, buy it from me. Any questions so far? We're flying through this, I'm sorry, but one to give y'all some questions, but it can, again, a week-long training session on any part of all of these. So, yes ma'am? Will the slides be available online? They sure will and I will double check but I'm sure, I believe the videos will be uploaded to WordPress TV along with the slide tags. So, and you'll be getting emails to let you know when those come out, but these will be available. We'll talk after I get through and we'll find a way to do that. You're welcome. And this is pretty much what you need to look at, dang it's hot in here, for an e-commerce business. Deal with your business model first. That is going to determine everything else that you do. Come up with your business plan, make sure it's financially viable for you to do what you want to do. Get your website set up, but base it on what you have determined in your business model. Set up your support systems. How are, which would be back to the other slide, inventory management, if you're going to need that. Fulfillment systems, possible procurement systems, sales tax reporting, things of that nature. Get those in place and then start making sure that you're, through your content, your social media strategy, things like that, you're getting the word out that people know. But make sure you're getting it out to the market that you want to buy from you. We cool on that? All right, these are the issues that I, as a CPA and the other other business professionals that I work with have had to deal with once the site's built. These are things I want you to keep in mind as you're working with your customer, you're building the website, that these may come into play, might not be immediately, it could be six months a year down the road. But if it comes up within six months and they have to turn around and have it a complete rebuild of their website to accommodate that, they're not going to be happy. You're not going to be happy because no matter what your customer does, it's going to be your fault. I think we've all been there before. But one of the things is your products, what products is that customer going to purchase? Are they going to have variations or are they going to have modifiers? Do we, you all know the difference between a variation and a modifier? Variation is I'm going to buy a shirt but I can buy that in different colors, different variations. A modifier is like going to Burger King and having it your way. It's the same product but we're going to get extra pickle, we're going to take this out, we're going to take that out, put this on. Those are modifiers. Rarely will you run into modifiers on in e-commerce but you will certainly run into variations. And part of your website design is to remove any friction that it takes from that customer from the time they decide they want to buy something to checking out and paying for that item. I have seen some where we're going to buy a pair of shoes. Well, I go out and I say I want a pair of kids' tennis shoes. I want high cut, low cut. What color do I want? What color do I want the laces? You know, what size? I got to answer 15 freaking questions just to buy that thing. I just want to say I want this green pair of Converse and I don't care what the size nine, let me buy it. If you're going to have variations try to keep them to two. Yes sir. Yes, uh-huh. Yeah, uh-huh. I'm going to change this particular product one way or the other. It would be a modifier in an e-commerce situation but it's usually you're making a change to a particular product as opposed to offering options within such as color or size and that would particularly be a variation. Any questions about that? Um, that's KU's or SKUs. Most inventory systems and e-commerce systems are going to want to SKU. That uniquely identifies that item from not only the sell of the item but the purchase of the item, tracking your on-hand counts. Some systems will allow you to have multiple SKUs. One you keep internally. One you might be able to put a UPC code on for that particular item. If you're buying that from a particular vendor you might want to put their SKU in because when you get ready to order it and you order the ABC 33 which is your SKU, your supplier is going to say what the hell is this? Tell us what ours is and at that point a lot of customers they pull out their pad and they start saying okay mine is this the customers that and they're having having to hand write purchase orders. What you want to be able to do is if you need to order that item you need to be able to issue a purchase order to your vendor with their information and get it directly to them without having to take all of the time to cross-reference. You will screw it up. I've screwed it up. Everyone I've worked with is human nature. You're going to transpose something so and now we're going to on procurement how are you going to get those? Are they something you're making yourself like jewelry things of that nature? Are you purchasing directly from a vendor and you're storing them? You know you might have 250 cases of I love my cat coffee mug sitting on your kitchen table and everywhere else your husband and wife bitching about having to jump over all the time but you could also drop ship. Once an item is ordered from my customer orders an item I order it from my vendor they ship it directly to the customer. I don't have to touch it. Variation on that is I place the order it gets shipped to me I turn it around and ship it to my customer but you have to take in an account based on which method you're going to use there are costs involved so when you're dealing with your business model and your business plan as part of the cost you need to think of in fulfillment as far as the deliveries go are you going to take them to the post office sort of FedEx? Are you going to use a fulfillment service which their warehouse somewhere else the order goes to that business and they ship it out to your customer for you? You have to think about packing slips you know customer opens the box they want to make sure what's in there is what they ordered you want to have it branded with your logo your information your return policy same with the invoice where it shows that they've paid for that product a lot of times when you're doing drop ships if your customer or you are going to deal with a company that will drop ship directly to your customer make sure they'll allow you to put your branded custom packing slips in that box and possibly label that package with your custom shipping labels I have opened and this is more of an accounting term the between an invoice and a packing slip or a pick ticket the packing slips and the pick tickets should not have the cost on there that's just a accounting control but it does happen and what's going to happen is your customer is going to buy a $95 item from them your vendor ships it to them they've thrown the paid invoice in the box and then your customer opens it up and finds out you only paid $15 for that which raises all types of issues so you want to make sure that when you place the order with your vendor they will allow you to send a PDF or a copy of that packing slip to be included you want everything branded you want it to be look like it all came from you no one else is involved a lot of times the customer finds out where you're purchasing your product from they go around you the next time and they start ordering directly at a discounted rate so now you've lost that customer they will do anything to save a penny just like any of us will so the other issue is going to be payments and again we could have done a whole session on payments but how you're going to get paid is going to depend on what you're going to sell are you selling just individual items you want them to add it to their shopping cart and then check out and they're good to go are the digital downloads um i'm sorry if i'm in the way digital downloads when you're dealing with a payment processor and there are thousands of them out there i find the most common for e-commerce sites as they're starting to grow are going to be stripe or paypal each one has its benefit each one has its drawback but the one thing you want to watch out for are the fees associated with accepting those payments such as stripe they're going to charge you 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction you can go to your bank and they will probably refer you through uh to authorized net authorized net is going to charge you a fee every time you think about them and then on top of that your bank is going to charge you a fee because authorized net did and you might not be getting the best discount rates and i have seen instances where you did not make a single sell and still get an $80 bill at the end of the month just to cover the minimum fees which is just outrageous so you have to think about how you're selling what the volume is the you know if you're going to sell $50,000 that might only be two items paypal might be the best also the perception some people don't think that they're not getting the value when they see paypal as opposed to being able to see a normal checkout like they see on amazon or something like that also take into account your refunds you're going to have to refund some money it might be partial refunds say there was an error in this something happened and so you're going to give them a partial refund just for goodwill will paypal allow you to do that will stripe allow you to do that how difficult is to process that refund i have had the instance on authorize.net in retail situations where we're able to take the credit card through the point of sale system but to do the refund we had to go find a windows machine that was running us a particular version of internet explorer log into their site in order to manually process that refund which took about 20-30 minutes and most of my customers are all running apple machines they're running their stores on ipads it's like i am not buying a windows machine just to do a freaking refund so and then they realize they're in a three-year contract it's gonna be impossible to get out sales tax like i said welcome to hell this is just a bottomless pit when you start dealing yes ma'am oh i'm so sorry well it'll help that was with authorize.net that um and that went through one of the banks that was going with authorize.net and then i found out that both were charging usage fees just to be able to process a credit card so everybody had their hand in your pocket at that point uh i'm sorry authorize.net now this was several years ago i'm not sure i'm not going to i'm sorry still the same way i'm not going to slight them my i'm speaking from my experience and i wasn't happy for other businesses they work great it works great again it depends on what you're selling and to whom you're selling it to um anybody know what nexus is huh any any google font nexus determines if you have a particular presence or a requirement in a state to file sales taxes and income taxes it puts you in in there as a business depending on how you're warehousing your item where you're selling these items if you're selling here in georgia you have nexus in georgia you need to be collecting georgia sales tax there are currently 160 counties that you would have to keep track of plus city of atlanta with additional one percent for folton county yes ma'am you do not charge sales tax for services and as of friday uh digital materials that are downloaded in georgia are non-taxable also uh in texas they are and there is this calculated formula that texas uses on the first 20 percent of the purchase is taxable the next 15 is that half the rate and you know at that point i won't take on a texas client i just not going to deal with that physical products uh-huh yes sir the you where the use tax comes into your and you are correct and it's just a little bit of the term terminology if i purchase something say for my store and i have it in on the shelf and i decided i need to pull it for my own personal use or i need to pull it in and use it for store use at that point i am the end user the the issue with sales tax is someone's got to pay tax in the end i purchased it uh tax exempt because i was purchasing it for resale i now have to do a self-report the use tax because i've now brought it in for my own use so all of the state forms will say give you option report your sales report your use taxes so that rarely comes into play with the retail side or the e-commerce side on the use tax rentals rentals are a whole different different issue there uh the rates are going to be an issue yes ma'am to drop shipping it depends on the state and they are you think the internal revenue codes bad take a look at the state's sales tax codes they are intentionally ambiguous and difficult to understand because it makes it easy for the state to determine how they want to interpret that and then it is up to you to go to court and explain why they're wrong and they change like the wind so it again it depends we have you have to look at what what the product is where your shipper is um i have a lady here that we're working with she's um having the product shipped from her supplier in california if we're in georgia we do not have to deal with california sales tax they are charging her california sales tax based on where that items being shipped within california and in dealing with the state board of equalization in california i can tell you that company has probably gone through one heck of a sales tax audit and those are not pretty you think an audit from the irs that's a walk in the park to what a sales tax audit is going to be um and so they're covering their tail they're going to make sure that they are not going to have to deal with that again and it just depends on who your supplier is where they're located the state they might not have a state sales tax but the local county or city might be charging a tax so it just like i said we're in hell the rates are going to be different also new york if i'm going to buy men's shoes clothing women's shoes women's clothing usually city of new york i'm going to pay 8.75 percent in sales tax if that item's under 110 dollars i don't have to pay the state or the local state tax i'm going to pay the local tax so those are only 4.75 percent in tax how do you get your system to understand that this is going to fall into that particular rate whereas if it's 120 dollar item i need to charge an additional rate a lot of times these systems it's all or nothing we're going to charge one rate you know if it's taxable or no rate or no tax at all if you only have nexus in georgia and again i'm offering this as information this is not official cpa or legal advice to anybody but um if it's going out of state that is an out-of-state shipment you're not required to collect sales tax on that as long as you do not have nexus into the state that that's going to there are quite a few plugins that you can use some are expensive some are not so much but they're very good at determining they have already calculated all of these rules and regulations you tell them where your product is they handle the tax calculation on your website one is avalara and the other one is tax jar tax jar is wonderful it's very inexpensive but they do a very good job and i will recommend y'all go out and take a look at taxjar.com not so much to understand their product but look at their blog it's one of the most informative blogs for smaller resellers i have seen and uh analytics now we can talk google analytics we can talk dashboards we can talk a whole nine yards why i insist when we're helping set up e-commerce sites the first thing we do is we set up a google analytics account and we set up a webmaster tools account we don't ask our customers to do that they're going to need it we're going to go ahead and get it done i then webmaster tools then i will hire somebody that understands google analytics and give them give my customers training in it also give them training in seo keyword research have a seo audit done on the website my goal i'm as successful as my customers are successful and i i truly want them to do well so i try to give them as much traction as possible when they start out all of these things that you're usually after thoughts we want them at the very beginning if nothing else it gives you the baseline of where you started so now you can track your progress based on your products based on your social media your keywords you know everything that goes along with that you can track metrics and you can track kpis have you all heard of both of those with google analytics some of the metrics are page views unique visitors things of that nature a kpi is you're going to look at what is important to you in all of these metrics and you're going to say which one is going which one's not working and which one do i need to improve those become your key performance or even key predictive indicators those are the ones you're going to watch like a hawk and see if you can get those to move if you can then you go on to the next you've moved to the next step we start looking at all of the possible thousands of metrics that you can track on your side in your business identify the ones that are key to move you to the next step do that make sense and sometimes the lines get blurred in between there a lot of people ask or what what's the best kpi that i can do for my e-commerce site again google it you'll get 50 000 different suggestions the best kpi for your website or your e-commerce site is what is important to you what do you want need and then watch it i've seen some the the best 75 kpis for your site who is going to keep track of that it just becomes a number keep them to three to five at the most you can still track as many metrics as you want the kpis are going to be the key indicators that are telling you how your business is doing and what you need to improve once you get those taken care of move in another set of kpis in some cases you'll keep the same kpi that you're going to watch constantly but you can get overwhelmed with the amount of information coming from google analytics it's good that it's there that's why we add that in at the very beginning because we know where we started and we can see where how how we've gone um financial reporting ultimately somehow you're going to have to report how well you've done um a lot of these systems will be more than happy to keep track of all of your revenue for you but how are you going to keep track of any of your shipping costs you know i had to pay for a business license i had to hire someone to help me package some of these things i had to buy packing material all of the expenses related to your business those can add up and where you think you're making 25 50 profit margins on your products they get eaten away and you're actually losing money and while that happens is you say i had 250 thousand dollars in sales this year but my bank account has been overdrawn for the past three months whereas my money going because you're not seeing those items unless you're tracking them and some there are quite a few online accounting packages fresh books zero quick books online meant there what you have to do to decide on the financial side what is it what is important to me to monitor just check the help the financial health of my business and then look at the products to match that but the key here is you want to watch your profit i can't stress that enough look at your bottom line if it is not healthy your business is not healthy and then the other additions who knows your customers will come up with things that no one has ever thought of but that's why they're they're unique and who they are um any questions on these these are the issues that we have to deal with once you've created your customer the website's done and they're ready to run their business and in some cases a lot of this can be easily taken care of of what we have to work with sometimes it's a faulty foundation and we have to send them back and say you got to start all over again and that is not somebody something i want to tell someone that just spent five thousand dollars on the website of their dreams the other thing you have to remember is particularly as designers when you're dealing with your customer there's a lot of emotion involved this website this business is their baby you have to be sometimes the voice of common sense and tell them i know you want to do it this way i know you want to do this but to do it correctly and get what you want out of it you really need it to to do it this way because you can give them exactly what they ask for and it's nothing that what they truly need and once that website goes live they've not had a sale in nine months no one's visiting it is not because they got crappy content crappy products or anything like that because you did a bad job designing it and that's what they're going to say so unfortunately that's just the way it is yes ma'am again it did any answer you're ever going to get any of these places going to be it depends that is not a cop out but it would depend on the type of product some states are more tax friendly toward a certain product than they are for others so it would kind of depend on what you're doing if you're going to go shopping again tax jar and avalara avalara i believe that's dot com their blogs are some of the best you will find in understanding sales tax but written in a way that the normal person can understand avalara avalara avalara i'm a cpa we can't spell and tell from my slides we're not the most artistic people on the face of the earth either tax jar t-a-x-j-a-r zero and it's x-e-r-o yes yes ma'am it they it depends on the platform some will take care Shopify takes care of it for you no problem they they they know the rules they keep track of the tax rates if you're going to go ahead and build the tax rates into the e-commerce website remember most of the web most tax rates change every quarter you're going to have to go through there and update those and figure out which ones have changed which ones have haven't and then also for which state Shopify has that built in avalara and tax jar take care of all of that for you you don't ever have to worry about whether you're charging the correct rate or not and yes sir with retainers we're talking about we're going to take a retainer and apply monthly invoices against that balance i have found that harvest works very well for retainers harvest i believe the um url is getharvest.com it is not a full-blown project management system but for retainers things like that it's a very good easy to use system and wonderful it will integrate also if you need to get it to an accounting package it integrates seamlessly with zero and quickbooks online also and you only have to enter the information once and with these systems that's the key you want if you're going to have to enter information your customer their customer is you want it entered once and let it seamlessly flow through the other components if you have to take it out of one and key it into another and then take it out of that and key it into another something's going to get miskeyed it's going to get incorrect and one you could have a tax problem your customer is going to be ticked off you don't want to lose the customer you have put too much into gaining that customer's first purchase you want the repeat customer and yes sir that's a whole different area that's outside i will say my my expertise on the e-commerce side um some of the designers in here do just that particularly with like non-profit organizations ask around and someone will be able to help i'm sorry i i yes ma'am does it does it okay fresh books has updated quite a few times the last time i was using it was back probably four years ago okay any other questions across the board i'm so sorry it's hot i hope i did not bore you because now now we're talking numbers and accounting and crap and it doesn't matter how hot that is you're going to fall asleep no matter what thank y'all so very much