What is E-commerce
If you want more than just a website offering your services and products, but rather a real, profit-making online business, you will need a site that focuses on true E-commerce optimization. After all, E-commerce sites are the bridge between you and your potential clients and customers. Without a properly strategized and operated E-commerce plan, you and your potential customers will remain separated.
Although traditionally E-commerce encompassed all buying and selling of services and products done electronically without any paper documents, it is now often thought as being any business done over the Internet. There are three categories of E-commerce: the business to consumer, B2C, used by companies such as Amazon, the business to business, B2B, model of Hewlett Packard and others, and the consumer to consumer transactions of websites such as eBay or Craigslist.
Getting Starting with E-commerce
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of creating a strong E-commerce plan, you will need to focus on five broad solutions. Seamless integration of these five solutions will lay the groundwork to subsequent online success. These five E-commerce solutions are: your domain name, your online shopping cart, where your website will be hosted, your site’s design, and your merchant account.
Creating and Buying your Domain Name
Your website’s domain name is its web address, and all online stores, in fact, all sites, must have a unique address. Once you and your team have created a domain name, or web address, you will need to purchase and register it. Once that it is done, it is truly yours and no one else can open an online store using that same domain name.
Your E-commerce Shopping Cart
This is where the integration of E-commerce’s different solutions begins. Your E-commerce shopping cart will in many ways be the conduit between you and your customers in that it will deal with customer orders, inventory and inventory orders, delivery of services and products, and customer service.
To create your E-commerce shopping cart you will need to select a shopping cart software program. Your E-commerce optimization specialist can help you understand which software is the best match for your particular business model.
E-commerce Web Hosting
Choosing the correct professional web hosting service for your online service is extremely important. Make the wrong decision, and you will lose money and experience frustration due to your website being down often and without warning; chose wisely, and you will enjoy working with a company that meets all of your needs regarding storage capacity, bandwidth, design, and 24/7 customer service. A good hosting company is one that you, the business owner, need not think twice about.
While designing the look of your online store is less expensive, less time-consuming and easier than designing the appearance of a brick-and-mortar business, it is still important and deserves adequate resources.
You must remember that web users spend less than five seconds on a site deciding to stay or move on. Having the right look to your online business will go a long way to enticing visitors to come in and have a virtual look around.
While designing your store, you will need to think about whether or not to use premade templates, the use of graphics and flash, and how visitors to your site will interface with your store. You can try to do all of this alone, or with the advice of a professional designer, or even leave it all up to a professional designer to create a website meeting your specifications.
Merchant Account: Make Paying Easy
So you have a great SEO plan and you have a high search engine ranking and visitors coming to your site and liking its appearance enough to “come in” and look around, but still you are not making many sales. “What gives?” you ask. Perhaps it is because you do not have a merchant account, which in turn makes it difficult for your prospective customers and clients to spend their money in your online store.
To optimize your online success you must make everything as easy as possible for people to make a purchase. You need to accept credit card payments, and to do this, you will need to have a merchant account that will withdraw money from your customers and clients’ credit card accounts.
Failing to have a merchant account is just setting yourself up for failure since nearly all your competitors’ websites do accept credit card payments. In addition to credit card payments, you need to strongly consider opening a PayPal account since many web users prefer to use this service to buy products and services.
Once you have got the five building-block solutions up and running, your E-commerce specialist will use more specialized optimization techniques to give your online business higher traffic, increased revenue and a superior ROI.
