What Is E-Commerce?
E-Commerce can be defined as business activities conducted using electronic data transmission via the Internet and WWW. A lot of people think only of business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping on the web as E-Commerce, but in fact, business-to-business (B2B) transactions account for a much larger proportion of revenue generated directly by electronic commerce.
Core Components Of An E-Commerce Website
If you break down any E-Commerce website into its primary components, you would see that it basically involves combining an easy-to-use, manageable website design with a Shopping Cart Program and an Online Merchant Account -- then setting those up through a reliable E-Commerce Hosting provider. If you acquire each of these components and integrate them together, you will have the basics you need to start attracting customers and selling your products & services online.
- Hosting Account - You will need an account from a web hosting provider and you will need to register a domain name for your business (such as www.adamssite.com). To ensure security of online transactions, your E-Commerce Hosting account must have SSL capability -- which is provided by SSL Certificates.
- Business Website - For this component you will either have to build a site yourself, or hire a professional design company to do it for you. We suggest looking into using low-cost Webpage Templates or E-Commerce Templates to fulfill this part of your E-Commerce puzzle rather than paying the higher costs of custom web design.
- Shopping Cart - As with your website's files, any shopping cart program you select will need to be uploaded to you hosting account and installed there. A good Shopping Cart Program will have its own online administrative webpage that allows you to easily add / remove product offerings and update information & pricing on each product.
- Merchant Account - In order to process credit card orders and eChecks from Internet customers, you will need to select an affordable merchant account provider. You can obtain an Online Merchant Account either from your bank or from one of many merchant account services available on the Internet.
Putting them all together into a working E-Commerce website does require some technical knowledge. If you don't have any experience at all within your company for configuring shopping carts and coding them correctly to work with your merchant account, you should seek assistance from a professional web developer.
Your Site Is Up, Your Ready To Receive Orders . . Now What?
A simple explanation of E-Commerce activities would stop at what it takes to build a such a website, but anyone who plans on running an online business will need to address several additional issues. View our E-Commerce Information section to learn more about such topics as attracting customers, order delivery and online customer support.