Home Ecommerce
Mar 10
Wednesday

  • No-name nobody's

    No-Name Nobody's

    Many small businesses choose to set up shop in the online world with a Web site name or URL on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod or MSN, rather than having their own Web address. Which company would you feel more comfortable buying from — www.members.tripod.com/loudinismagicshop or www.loudini,com? (The latter is a real Web site, specializing in magic accessories.) I don't thi... Read More

  • Slow Pages

    Slow Pages

    Many small-business Web sites load far too slowly. We've checked out small-business Web sites that it took more than five minutes to load one web page. Most sites aren't that bad, but if your Web pages take more than 20 seconds to load over a modem, you run the risk of losing visitors to your site. Photos and graphics with large file sizes are usually the problem when a page loads slowly.

    Read More

  • Pictures

    Pictures Paints A Thousand Word

    You wouldn't send out a marketing brochure that's all words and no pictures. So why do so many companies create Web pages without graphics or photos of any sort? If a single picture paints a thousand words, use a judicious number of them on your Web site to communicate volumes.

    Read More

  • Disappearing Acts

    Disappearing Acts

    We are floored by how many small-business Web sites are here today, gone tomorrow, and back again next Tuesday. It may sound obvious to say that it's incredibly important that your Web site is up and running when customers go looking for it, but the disappearing act is a mistake that many small businesses make. How to make sure your site is up?

    Read More

  • Background noise

    Background Noise

    For some reason, many small-business Web sites use busy background wallpaper. You'll find gray embossed company logos, wild patterns and other distracting background designs on many small-business sites. People think the designs add interest and panache to the sites, but all it does is interfere with the messages.

    Read More

curly
Ecommerce Websites: Taking money through your web site starts here

While many web sites exist simply to provide information, an increasing number are being designed as ‘online shops’ where users can buy and pay for ‘stuff’ that is then sent to them. If you are planning a site that ‘sells stuff’ and want to take payment online you’ll need to be able to make transactions through your site so shoppers can pay using a credit card or method such as PayPal. In order to do that your site will need an ‘Ecommerce’ engine.

The term Ecommerce is simply a shortening of ‘electronic commerce’ – i.e. payment for something electronically using a card rather than physically paying cash. This method of payment has become increasingly common and increasingly secure.

Why have an online shop?

There are significant advantages of having an Ecommerce website:

  • Your ‘shop’ is open 24/7
  • You are open to business from a distance and indeed to around the world
  • It’s easy to make price changes, run special offers etc.
  • Customers can shop incredibly quickly
  • Online shops have a much lower cost base to their ‘bricks and mortar’ counterparts
  • You can build a valuable customer database for future email marketing

The fact is that more and more people expect to shop on line more and more often. If you work in any sort business where your revenue is driven by exchanging money for an easily deliverable commodity you have to ask yourself the question ‘can I afford not to have a transactional website’.

How easy it to get into Ecommerce?

There are a variety of Ecommerce systems available from ‘off the shelf’ solutions to individually developed ‘bespoke’ options. Which one you choose will depend on what sort of stuff you sell and how big the shop needs to be.

Apart from transactional capabilities online shops need a database of product, product availability and prices, delivery details etc. Generally the trickiest thing is making sure your existing database suits the Ecommerce engine you choose. The great thing about Ecommerce selling is that the Ecommerce system will talk directly to the database so you can monitor stock levels at all times.

How does Ecommerce affect search engine optimisation?

Ecommerce systems can be easily incorporated into search engine friendly websites and developed to be ‘continuously friendly’. This allow not only your web site, but also all the stuff you sell to be listed and highly ranked within search engines.
 
Home Ecommerce