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Payment Gateways
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Merchant Account
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Shopping Carts
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What is ecommerce?
The word commerce is usually defined as trading on a large
scale. Very basically e-commerce, is the ability to sell
products and/or services using electronic methods of shopping
and payment.
A typical ecommerce solution includes the following
components:
An online catalog that lists the products/services you
are selling and their prices.
A shopping cart that collects the items a customer wants
to buy.
An order form that gathers their payment information,
applies shipping/tax, and summarizes the pending order.
Transaction Processing that subtracts payment from the
customers account and applies it to your own.
Real-time transaction processing is provided via a vendor.
Offline-transaction processing can be done by a merchant using
a credit card machine. Of course, order fulfillment is also an
important element of ecommerce.
An HTML form posts all of the information needed to process
a transaction to your vendor's transaction server. Once the
transaction server gets all of the transaction information,
the transaction is processed. After the transaction is
processed, it communicates the result back to your website,
which communicates with the customer, and makes appropriate
changes to your database (if inventory control is used).
For the Customer on your site it should mean: See>Click
>Purchase. A No hassle buying experience. For you it also means a way to reduce costs and risks of
doing business on line.
The primary goal of creating a successful ecommerce site
is to "Simplify" the process for both buyer and
seller. Users generally like a "one click" process. At any
point in the buying process the customer should be able to
"check out" or "check the account status" or click to any
other category in the site (even the home page).
For larger sites "search capabilities"
are a must. Your customer should be able to search by product,
product number, and category as an example allowing for quick
retrieval of information.
Information about the site's security methods is necessary
to instill confidence in your customer. For larger sites, it
is preferable to have a system that keeps track of users,
greets them with a personal message and allows the ability to
offer them related products either through email or by
directing them to other areas of the website. This should be
done so as to provide this as a helpful experience rather than
annoying.
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