Ecommerce Basics

What are the Basics?

What are the basics you need for your own ecommerce web site?

The simple steps are:

	First, to build a catalogue that your visitor can use to see your range of products.
	Second, you need a way to enable your customer to place an order and to have a record of that order. This is typically the shopping cart element of your website.
	Finally, you need a way to collect your customer's money. Credit card systems provide a convenient means of payment for virtual transactions as well as a facility for handling multi-currency transactions at a low cost. In more detail:

1. The Catalogue

A catalogue can be "Static" - where all the pages are built by you, typically using HTML. Or "Dynamic" - where the information is stored in a database and the catalogue and product detail pages are created in response to customer requests using scripting.

Some shopping cart software or payment services require you to build your own static pages and then link to the shopping cart from each individual product. Alternatively, other software may create the dynamic pages for you or you can create your own dynamic catalogue pages.

Apart from the information about each of your products, if you want product images, you will need the ability to create and manipulate images of your products and services. This means that you may need image editing software.

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2. Shopping Cart

Adding a shopping cart functionality to your website enables customers to add multiple products to a virtual cart and then pay you at a virtual checkout.

You can either purchase shopping cart software that can be added to your website or use a third party service. You will usually be required to tailor the shopping cart in some way to suit your site and products. However, this software should be easier to integrate into the design of your website.

Using shopping cart service, whereby a third-party company generates the cart and checkout pages, means that customers will temporarily leave your site and go to the third party site to view their shopping cart and to checkout. The up-front cost will be less than that of buying cart software but you will usually have to pay a flat fee (possibly a monthly or annual fee too) as well as a per-transaction fee.

3. Collecting Money

Most shopping cart software and some services require you to have your own merchant account.

A merchant account can be obtained through your business banker and allows you to accept credit cards as payment either directly, by phone or through a secure website.

A merchant account approves you to have credit card funds put directly into your bank account, these are usually accompanied by a gateway, which allows you to process credit cards in real-time.

The majority of standard e-commerce solutions now come with payment solutions built in and directly linked into a secure server or secure payment service. You should ensure that your shopping cart software or service supports the particular payment service that you will be using.

In the case of third-party shopping cart services, most are also payment services. Where you rent the functionality and payment mechanisms for your online business.

This will probably involve an up-front fee and a monthly subscription. In laymen’s terms your front-end site is linked to a back-end store hosted by a 3rd party.The customer is sent to the other site to complete the transaction.

Typically the third party site acts as a reseller for your product or service and handles the credit card processing for you.