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Internet e-Commerce
4 important tasks involved in e-Commerce
Almost everyone has purchased either a product or service online. But if you are
interested in selling online, you may not know what is involved in an Internet
e-Commerce transaction and what services it requires. You can divide Internet
e-Commerce into four simple parts, each to do a specific task.
Merchant Account is the first requirement towards Internet e-Commerce. Quite
simply, a merchant account is a merchant identification number and a means to
deposit funds into your bank account. This is accomplished using either software
for your computer or a little terminal box (similar to the kind found in retail
stores, where you can swipe your credit card).
E-commerce, broken down, is extremely simple. The merchant account allows you to
take credit cards, the shopping cart enables your customers to order your
products quickly and easily, real-time processing allows orders to automatically
be placed in your merchant account, and your web hosting company shows your
website to the entire world. Once you have these items in place, now you will
see how e-commerce can work for you.
An online shopping cart is very similar to the shopping carts you find at your
neighborhood grocery store. As you browse the aisles of the store, you place the
items you wish to buy into your cart, and then purchase them all at the same
time. The shopping cart system needed for Internet e-Commerce works the same way:
you browse the online "store," pick out the products you want, and purchase them
together when you are ready. The advantage of the Internet e-Commerce, online
system is flexibility - if you need a product in another size or color, for
instance, you can simply change the selection before you submit your order.
In Internet e-Commerce, real-time processing means less work for you and your
employees by not requiring them to process the orders received through your Web
site. All orders placed are automatically processed and payment information is
recorded. All that is left for your company is to fulfill the orders and ship
the products.
Web-hosting is the last item you will need to be able to sell your products
online is a place to set up shop. By this we mean a place to host your Web site.
Web site hosts simply store all of the pages in your site, allowing anyone to
access your store. The important thing to remember when choosing a host is
compatibility.
Your host needs to be compatible with your merchant account, your shopping cart
system, and your real-time processing. This way, you know for certain that your
Internet e-Commerce systems are going to work together properly and that your
customers will have a smooth e-commerce transaction each and every time. Making
Internet e-Commerce business information available is one of the most important
ways to serve your customers. But if you look at serving the customer, you'll
find even more ways to use WWW technology.
You won't get Newsweek magazine to write up your local store opening, but you
might get them to write up your Web Page address if it is something new and
interesting. Even if Newsweek would write about your local store opening, you
wouldn't benefit from someone in a distant city reading about it, unless of
course, they were coming to your town sometime soon. With web page information,
anybody anywhere who can access the web and hears about you is a potential
visitor to your web site and a potential customer for your information there.
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