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The Five Steps of E-Commerce
You set up a retail business, you advertise in your local newspaper, you get customers coming into your store, and you receive payment at the cash register. Create an online store, and...how do you get customers? How do you receive payment? The concept is the same, but the steps are different. Step 1: Create your website If you don't have web design skills, you can hire a qualified web designer to create a website for you, or you can use an online site builder. Think of it as hiring an architect and an interior decorator compared to setting up shop in an existing store. Using a web designer With the services of a web designer, you can have a unique website template and website customized to your specific needs. A web development team can also add features such as Flash headers or any programming needed for your site. If your company image is critical, a custom-designed site that conveys the right professional image is a must. Using an online site builder An online site builder is the budget way to go. With site builder programs such as Site Studio, your website can be online within minutes. A step-by-step menu allows you to choose a layout and colors, and then add a site description, a logo, and content. Your template may not be unique, but your content will. Step 2: Set up an e-commerce store Your customers will browse at your website, select some items, and then pay for them. When you set up an e-commerce shopping cart, you're providing a way for your customers to bring their purchases to the cash register. The program you choose will allow you to enter your products in the database and allow shoppers to choose products when they click on "Add to cart" or something similar. Two well-known shopping carts, osCommerce and Miva Merchant, both allow you to do these tasks: ? Add, edit, and delete product categories and other information osCommerce osCommerce is an open source program. Store owners can set up their online stores using osCommerce with no costs involved. For small stores, it has all the features you need for an online store. Drawbacks of osCommerce are that customization is not easy, and online stores using osCommerce tend to look similar. Miva Merchant While Miva Merchant carries a price tag of $995, some web hosts offer Miva Merchant licenses with their hosting plans. If you choose Miva as your shopping cart, be sure to host your site with a host that provides Miva support. Its learning curve is steep, and it requires the support of people who know how to work with it. With the price and the steep learning curve, you get more features, and you can customize the program more. Add-in modules can be bought that perform a number of tasks. In addition, a strong support community is available in the Miva user group forums. Step 3: Get a merchant account and payment gateway When customers arrive at the checkout counter, you need a way for their payments to be transferred from their credit card accounts to your bank account. The method you choose may depend on your sales volume. For high-volume sales, an e-commerce merchant account plus a payment gateway will meet your needs. A merchant account provider authorizes the transfer of payments to your account, and a payment gateway transfers the information from your customers' financial institutions to yours. Most merchant accounts have setup fees, transaction fees, monthly fees, and statement fees. The transaction fees are less than what you'd pay using a third party credit card processor such as PayPal. With all the fees, however, the overall cost is typically lower only if your monthly sales volume is over about a thousand dollars. For medium and low volume sales, PayQuake and PayPal are viable options. PayQuake PayQuake offers three merchant account types to choose from. Although they all require payment gateways, the two smaller plans have no monthly minimums. You can upgrade to a higher or lower plan if your needs change. PayPal PayPal has become a household name. Customers can send payment through PayPal via credit card or via money that they transfer into their PayPal account. While the fees per transaction are higher than with merchant accounts, there are no setup or monthly fees, and you don't need a payment gateway. You pay only when you have financial transactions. Step 4: Create a secure payment environment A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate enables you to receive credit card information securely from your customers. When a payment page is using SSL data to encrypt data, a small image of a lock appears at the bottom right of the screen. Some web hosts offer SSL certificates as part of their hosting packages. If your web host package doesn't include SSL certificates, you can purchase one separately. With PayPal, no SSL certificate is required. Step 5: Generate traffic Your products are on display in your newly designed store, your shopping cart is set up and ready to use, and you have everything in place to be able to receive payments securely. Now all you need are customers. This is where marketing comes in. ? Submit your site to search engines. For related information, see these pages: ? Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.
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Turn Your Rusty Junk Into eBay Gold Often times people to stop to realize the income potential of their "junk". And, when they DO decide it might be worth selling, they never give eBay a second thought. How To Prevent Your 3rd Party Merchant Account From Suspension What would you do if you were sent an email from your online credit card processor telling you that your account has been suspended or frozen? How are you going to pay the bills in the meantime? It is extremely important for you to familiarize yourself with the terms of your contract with your credit card processor. As long as you comply with their set regulation and guidelines to maintain your account in good standing you should have no problems. Helping Your Visitors: a State of Mind What does "helping your visitors" mean exactly?It means writing your sites, newsletters and emails in such a way as to help each visitor achieve his or her goal.That may sound like a simple task, but it isn't. Delivering Information Products Through Paypal Automatically Paypal is one of the wonders of the web. Never has it been easier for individuals or small business to receive payments though the web & to be able to accept payment though debit or credit cards without having to own a merchant account. The Internet and Customer Care: Aid or Anarchy? It was reported in 'Marketing' magazine this month, that Britain is becoming a "disaffected nation", with each adult apparently making an average of 12 complaints to service providers each year, based on a "Service in Britain" survey by ASR (Andrew Smith Research). In response to the rise of the 'assertive consumer', brands are endeavouring to make sure 'good customer service' is a recognisable characteristic in the form of testimonials, efficient call centre responses and empowering staff throughout the company to resolve problems. Set Yourself Apart From The Ordinary I have written at length about the need to anticipate your visitors' needs. I have talked about how the first screen of the homepage needs to connect immediately and directly with the task each visitor has on his or her mind. Evaluating Vendors of Ecommerce Fulfillment Services Once your website has secured an order, you have to fulfill it. While the fulfillment of digital goods is usually handled online, the delivery of physical goods is handled in a "brick-and-mortar" world. Intranet Project - RAD or Waterfall? Building BridgesI have often used the analogy of building a bridge to explain to business colleagues the difference between Rapid Application Development (RAD) and Waterfall.Let's say that we are in the middle ages and the Mayor of Kingston-upon-Thames is evaluating whether or not to build a bridge over the river to the north side, to replace the current ferry. Government Buying and Selling on the Internet Global Insight, a leading economic and financial forecasting company, (formerly DRI-WEFA), states that all levels of government (federal, state, and local) should see steady increases in the purchases of goods and services through the year 2009.Vendors willing to make the commitment to sell to government can reap the benefits of this projected government spending. Online Shopping: Legal Challenges for Taxing Authorities E-commerce offers customers the chance to eliminate many stages in the sales/distribution chain. The mark-ups that occur between manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and consumers can add the cost of goods purchased by consumers. Accept Credit Cards Online Without a Merchant Account There are two major ways to accept credit cards on your website. The first and most expensive is to have your own merchant account. eCommerce, How Much Does It cost? Making profits with your existing website design or creating a new online store can be exciting, affordable and most of all; rewarding. Mmmm . The Webmasters Assistant There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic allowing them to monitor the number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and even the length of time each visitors spends accessing the website.However, despite the considerable data available what is missing is anything to tell the webmaster what the visitor was thinking. Online Credit Card Processing - How to Accept Credit Cards - Ecommerce 101 Back in 1998 (through 2000 or so), I worked for a small company (called PaymentNet / then Signio) that handled online transactions. Verisign later purchased this company, and the product team I led integrated the "client" - the portion that took the credit card information and sent it to our servers for processing. Selling From Your Website Greetings!Friends and relitives ask us all the time " How do sell from your website?" and no doubt you want to know as well. Over the next two issues we will be covering this very thing! We decided to divide it into two camps - tangibles and non-tangibles. Choosing on Order Fulfillment Service When your eCommerce business grows to the point where you can no longer package and ship the orders yourself, it's time to begin outsourcing your order fulfillment. Although all order fulfillment centers offer the same basic services, their individual methods and costs will help you choose one over the other. Projecting Your Image Whether you sell a product or merely sell time to your employer in your labor, your main product is you. You sell yourself with every move you make, every word you speak or write, every attitude you display. The Top 10 E-Commerce Ways to Follow up with Clients - Part 2 Did you know that 80% of all sales are made after the 5th contact? The biggest mistake we make is not following up with our clients regularly. We not only lose the chance to offer other services and products, we lose the chance for satisfied clients' referrals. Google Catalogs - Old Gashioned Mail Order Meets High Tech Search In addition to Google's Froogle shopping service (still in beta), which features a searchable database of online merchants, Google is also beta-testing their Google Catalog service. Google Catalogs provides a searchable central repository of hundreds of mail-order catalogs. How To Implement E-Business Solutions Successfully Pitfalls of E-business solutions installation processA large distribution company has decided to use a new online supply chain management solution. The people - those who were supposed to use the system - were quite skeptic about the ability of the system, as they did not have enough knowledge and had very little or no training in using a similar system.
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