Thoughts on Ecommerce for only half of our products?

[hfranz]

We have 300 plus products. Half of our products are Industrial Grade and Half are Consumer Grade.

Ex: Some products are less than $5,000 and others are $20,000.

With a new CMS in the thought process, I need to know if Half of our site can offer a shopping cart and the other half, displayed the same, but cannot purchase online, but need to call us. Maybe when they try purchasing  $10,000 product they get a message saying, please contact our Customer Service Department to process your order.

If we were to do this, is there a plugin for this?

I am thinking, of having two different sections on our website, but I do not want to cause confusion to customers. Shoud this maybe be set up on a different subdomain? Or same domain, but different section.

Can shopping cart plugins allow you to set a purchase limit?

I am worried that if someone wants to purchase a consumer product, say costing $1,500 and then a larger item costing $10,000, and they are shopping online, that they will be upset if the order cannot be processed online, as that is what they intended to do.

[GeorgeDavis]

I am worried that if someone wants to purchase a consumer product, say costing $1,500 and then a larger item costing $10,000, and they are shopping online, that they will be upset if the order cannot be processed online, as that is what they intended to do.

Don't overestimate your customers desire to purchase online.  With the main site I'm responsible for we added online purchase capability in January and conversions went down by about 40% - the money coming in was only 10-20% of the value of what it would have been had we stuck with standard lead capture pages.  This was a very well through through and simple shopping cart that we had custom built for us as well.

We switched back to lead capture pages only in may and our total revenue with customer service agents/lead captures has been better than ever.

That being said, if you feel you really understand your prospects and want to do it this way, I don't see a reason why your e-commerce platform wouldn't support call-in-only products.  Setting this up would have no effect on search rankings in most cases so there is no reason to put it on a different domain.  MOST shopping carts have a setting for purchase limits as a credit card fraud protection feature.

I can imagine being mildly frustrated if I got all the way through an online purchase only to be told my amount was too high, but your sales are high dollar and to be honest I don't think I would be comfortable charging that amount of money without speaking to someone anyway.

[hfranz]

Thanks! I am a bit confused. So, your saying when you put the entire site to online purchasing, you saw a decrease in 10 - 20%, but when you just put the purchasing option on the lead pages, ( your most popular ?) your site was better than ever ? So basically a trial and error project ?

[GeorgeDavis]

To clarify, (obviously these are not real numbers) If we received $1000 a week with lead capture pages and customer service agents, when we switched to "ecommerce" we billed only $600ish between the web sales and customer service agent sales.

Before the "ecommerce" approach, our pages were restricted to 2 different actions, either Call a phone number/email/chat to complete the sales process, or receive a free sample or demo of the product - in this way we were able to convince people who needed convincing, and the process seemed much simpler to the customer.

I think many would disagree with me, but I don't think it's always crucial to be able to purchase the product online.  Our customers are all construction/manufacturing foreman or supervisors so they feel more comfortable working over the phone or email usually.  I would imagine with products in the $20,000 range your prospects would want to talk to someone first as well.

Just my 2 cents

[EssEEmily]

Unfortunately, I can't speak for the plug in part of your question. However, I can offer up from a user experience perspective that this is a good case for testing out your site. You can test different messages, different abilities, different pricing and see what the consumer response is. Google Website Optimizer can help you set up an A B test so you can see what your costumers respond more favorably to.

I suppose your ability to do that depends on your flexibility with the shopping cart and, unfortunately, I am no expert on that. I would only suggest that you ask these questions when you are talking to your developer.

I hope that helps!  Best of luck.