E Com

Name:-Yogita Bangera Roll No:02/Two Class:S.Y.BBI Subject:-I.T

Definition of E-Commerce Electronic Commerce means buying and selling of goods and services across the internet. An e commerce site can be as simple as a catalog page with a phone no, or it can range all the way to a real time credit and processing site where customer can purchase downloadable goods and receive them on the spot.

What is E-Commerce Electronic Commerce (EC) is the paperless exchange of business information using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and related technologies. If you are familiar with Electronic Mail (E-Mail), computer bulletin boards, facsimile machines (faxes), Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) You can very wellunderstand what is e-commerce. These are all forms of EC. All EC systems replace all or key parts of paper-based work flow with faster, cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable communications between machines. In today's Defense Department procurement arena, however the most important EC technology to know about is Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI. Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well. A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as etail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web. Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private

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electronic market). Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

History Template:Malaika&&ShelbyThe meaning of electronic commerce has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing. Perhaps it is introduced from the Telephone Exchange Office, or maybe not.The earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system introduced in 1991. Although the Internet became popular worldwide in 1994, it took about five years to introduce security protocols and DSL allowing continual connection to the Internet. And by the end of 2000, a lot of European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate a word "ecommerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

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What to do to get started in E-commerce without a heavy investment ? 'Todays scientific and economy worlds demands unique ways for most kinds of job completion. Vendors and service providers will continually try to find unique ways to provide low-cost services to small businesses. One quick example is the numerous websites offering free development and hosting. For example, the sites offer a web development application in a "wysiwyg" (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) style that allows each person the ability to create their own type of website. Other options include participation in an online marketplace. These mechanisms are roughly designed to simulate a real marketplace that will attract customers due to a shop-atonce mentality instead of surfing the Internet for different goods and services. A fast developing theme among new and old participants in the digital economy is the use of ASPs (application service providers). These service providers allow you to purchase many of the off-the-shelf operating applications that you may use to run your business (finances to human resource management to inventory processing) at a much lower cost as well as have someone else manage and host the data. It also reduces the time and labor force necessary to run such types of operations. A final recommendation is the notion of partnering. Finding similar organizations that can share resources and expenses can help you achieve your goals in the digital economy. The key role of the digital economy and electronic commerce is to help your traditional organizational processes and daily routines and automate them through the Internet. The use of electronic commerce can very well share the burden burden and can help minimize the expense and difficulty. It stimulate a potential relationship for furthering business behavior

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The Roles Within Commerce A commerce transaction is a communicative transaction; that is, if two parties engage in a commercial transaction -- buying and selling something -- then that event is actually based not solely on the exchange of goods but also on linguistic and social role-playing. Commerce is governed by social rules (in any culture, a seller follows certain rules of behavior that are different from the buyer's rules of behavior), and by linguistic rules (certain words, gestures and tones have meanings specific to a discussion about buying something). A commerce transaction has two roles: seller and buyer. Each of these roles has its own agenda, but the logical assumption of a commerce transaction is that both parties want to cooperate to find a mutually acceptable solution. Each of these roles has a set of beliefs and expectations about its own purpose and agenda in a transaction, as well as beliefs and expectations about the other role's, well, role. Both buyer and seller roles have "comfort zones" built into the relationship based on their expectations and experience: perhaps the buyer believes that s/he can trust a car dealer only so far, or perhaps a merchant will extend credit to people whom s/he knows are from the neighborhood; these roles allow for some relaxation or flexibility of the rules they use to govern their participation in the transaction. This flexibility can be exploited by dishonest participants, but should one of the parties have reason to doubt this search for a mutually acceptable outcome, the entire commerce transaction becomes more difficult and may fall apart in distrust. Online commerce is still new enough that participants are still trying to get a handle on how the rules of commercial interaction apply to this new medium. The burden of smoothing the transition to online commerce falls to the creators and owners of ecommerce sites, because when a commercial transaction falters through misunderstanding or distrust, a typical buyer-to-be won't spend any effort analyzing the contradictory message cues or violated role-playing expectations. When a potential customer is frustrated, s/he will exit; the merchant has the investment in fostering the relationship, and so had better understand the mechanics of the relationship, starting with the roles.

The Buyer

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From The Point-of-View of the Buyer Buyers expect three important actions from a typical transaction: they want to make the decision to purchase something, they want to effect payment for this something, and they want to assume ownership of what they purchased. Anything that interferes with these three actions is going to bother the buyer. The first action, making the decision to buy, has some implicit hurdles. The buyer must find what they want, evaluate their budget, evaluate their trust of the merchant, etc. The buyer weighs a lot of factors and faces a basic fact of inertia that it is often easier to not buy than it is to buy; some merchants make the buying process absurdly difficult with such design decisions as forcing the user to register and log in before accessing the shopping cart function or requiring a specific browser for buying from their site. After all, the buyer expects to give their personal information, if they give it at all, when they pay, not when they're just shopping. When was the last time that you had to give your name when you walked into a store? Buyers don't want to buy without knowing they have bought. Buyers face some violations of the decision to buy from "slammers" and the illegal use of credit cards. Making it too easy for a buyer to purchase from your site -- for example through an "express lane" commerce track -- may backfire if the buyer thinks they have been tricked into the purchase. Buyers also consider themselves as having entered into a tacit contract with the merchant: when the buyer decides to buy something, s/he does so with an expectation about the availability of the something. Merchants declare the availability of their products, "available right now for immediate shipping" or "this will ship out in 5 days", and the buyer uses that availability in their process for deciding to buy. If the availability promised by the merchant proves false, the buyer will re-evaluate their decision to buy, even if they have already entered the ordering process. The second action, the payment, has some explicit trouble spots. The buyer needs feedback from the process that payment has been correctly made; the buyer needs to know that the totals are correct, that their credit card (for the sake of argument, consider this the predominant payment method) has been correctly charged, that the transaction is secure, and that they are protected in case something goes wrong with the transaction. If the user receives ambiguous feedback during this payment phase, they will be frustrated and worried, and will experience doubt towards every aspect of the transaction. This is such a simple milestone for the buyer, the payment phase, but online there is little reassuring feedback. In person, the buyer can confirm with a salesperson, online they have at best error messages and an email address for "customer service".

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The third action, assuming ownership, is especially full of frustration for the buyer, because s/he has committed to the purchase -- they've already paid -- and now they are at the mercy of the merchant for the delivery of their purchase. Up until they receive the order, buyers want to know the status of the order; providing useful order status information should be a requirement for any ecommerce site, but few sites display this information in ways that are useful for the buyer. I would suggest that most buyers want to know what has been paid for, how much has been paid, when the order (or separate items on the order) will be shipped, and when the order will be delivered. If the merchant fails to meet the buyers expectations -- whether the expectations are fair or accurate -- the buyer will be dissatisfied. Delayed orders face the possibility of cancellation. Most users understand that they have responsibilities when they become buyers, and most seem willing to forgive a great deal of shaky commerce systems and rough shopping experiences to buy online. The issue here, though, is that users shouldn't have to endure uncomfortable experiences to buy online, and it is up to ecommerce merchants smooth out the rough edges of the user experience. From The Point-of-View of the Seller The larger ecommerce web sites tend to treat individual buyers as statistics; individual users are difficult to deal with when the bottom line is the bottom line. Sales count as indications of trends: more click-throughs, more page hits, more traffic all mean more revenue. Pleasing the individual user is usually not a priority. Getting the users to recognize the site's branding is a priority, however, because the assumption is that exposure will translate to patronage. Most commerce sites don't seem to be designed for any typical user; these sites haven't built sample user profiles and then optimized site behavior for the expected behavior of these users. As online competition matures, though, we should see more sites carefully targeting their niche audiences. My guess is that ecommerce sites can't get a handle on the shear heterogeneity of the web's client-server interaction. So many browsers and platform combinations exist that no single system is going to accommodate every possible user, so ecommerce strategists have been allowed to think in terms of sectors of users and specific audiences. The truth, though, is that selective targeting is actually selective exclusion, based not on the audience's ability to be purchasers but on the ecommerce site's ability to scale its infrastructure and technological support.

The Seller

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From The Point-of-View of the Buyer Online, the basic operative metaphor for ecommerce sites is that of the "store", based on experience gained shopping in the real world. Ecommerce ventures can be grouped into sites of companies that exist primarily on the internet, and those that have real-world "brick-and-mortar" stores that have opened up sites (channels) on the internet. The attitudes users display towards these different categories of stores seem inconsistent at best. From what I've read and experienced, I think that any company on the web, whatever their history separate from the web, is judged according to a set of values and priorities derived from the web culture. Especially hard hit are companies that have made their stores into destinations that foster community; for example, there is a huge gap between deciding to shop for a book online, and deciding to drive over to my local Borders Books and Music store. With all the emphasis placed on "community" by ecommerce sites, the term destination seems particularly irreconcilable with the fact of web sites as collections of documents and files; there is no meaningful there there, and that seems to hurt companies that have established themselves as destinations for shoppers.

From The Point-of-View of the Seller The ecommerce site is out there on the web to make money. The goal is to generate always increasing traffic, so visibility is essential. Advertising, press releases, media exposure, partnerships -- these all are tremendously important for creating and maintaining public awareness of the site. The critical concerns governing the decision making process become: will a proposed change drive traffic to the site, and will it interfere with the basic ability to purchase from the site? The Other Players There are other roles involved in the entire chain of events when a buyer makes a purchase form a seller -- somebody may process the merchandise in the warehouse, somebody may ship the merchandise, somebody may deliver it -- but these roles are ancillary to the commerce transaction, and in fact are more appropriately parts of the relationship the seller has with his backend and fulfillment procedures. After all, when you walk into a store to buy a book, the mailman isn't standing next to the seller and participating in the transaction. A very important element in the commerce transaction is the merchant's customer service team, although it is unclear what role the presence and quality of customer service plays in the buyer's decision to purchase from a merchant. What is clear is customer service's important function as the representative of the online merchant: customer service is often the only contact for the customer, and usually the only way

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for the merchant to salvage a negative user experience or complaint into a positive reflection of the company's quality service. Recognizing Who's Who As obvious as these roles of buyer and seller may seem, it's not always easy to identify who is playing what role. In the offline world, different stores (and often different types of stores) have their own rules for dress and comportment of the sales staff, which can create interesting dynamics with the customers. While appearance and judgments based on appearance can have an effect on the tenor of a business relationship, appearance often provides useful cues for identifying the roles and players. The most common version of this buyer-seller relationship is that of the merchant, or store. If you walk into a book store, you are faced with some quite formal cues and rules. You know that the store has products for sale, and you can easily find the prices of the books. You can usually identify the employees, and while you may not see one specific "seller" you understand that the employees are all acting as agents for the merchant. You will probably see posted notices delineating the commerce rules for the merchant, such as return policies. An important part of the commerce relationship is the need to authenticate the other party: Is the seller reputable? Can he follow through with his promises? Does the buyer have good credit? The buyer and seller sound each other out during their commerce conversation; they weigh each other's manner and tone and body language. They look for social cues like seals of approval or credit ratings. They look to the people they know and past customers for a vetting of trust. They form judgments based on their perceptions and intuition, and they ultimately decide whether to complete the transaction. And you may even realize that the store employees have likely been taught how to treat and respond to customers, rules ranging from how to answer the phone to how to gift wrap purchases. The adoption of appropriate roles isn't always smooth. While working in a Borders Books store, I would routinely deal with customers who didn't understand that we were a book store. The well-lit spaces, the natural wood shelves, the comfortable chairs and sofas scattered through the space all indicated to these folks that we were a library. People would ask us where they could sign up for a card in order to borrow books.

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E-commerce advantages and disadvantages E-commerce provides many new ways for businesses and consumers to communicate and conduct business. There are a number of advantages and disadvantages of conducting business in this manner.

E-commerce advantages Some advantages that can be achieved from e-commerce include:  Being able to conduct business 24x7x365 -E-commerce systems can operate all day every day. Your physical storefront does not need to be open in order for customers and suppliers to be doing business with you electronically.  Access the global marketplace -The Internet spans the world, and it is possible to do business with any business or person who is connected to the Internet. Simple local businesses such as specialist record stores are able to market and sell their offerings internationally using ecommerce. This global opportunity is assisted by the fact that, unlike traditional communications methods, users are not charged according to the distance over which they are communicating.  Speed -Electronic communications allow messages to traverse the world almost instantaneously. There is no need to wait weeks for a catalogue to arrive by post: that communications delay is not a part of the Internet / e-commerce world.  Marketspace -The market in which web-based businesses operate is the global market. It may not be evident to them, but many businesses are already facing international competition from web-enabled businesses.  Opportunity to reduce costs -The Internet makes it very easy to 'shop around' for products and services that may be cheaper or more

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effective than we might otherwise settle for. It is sometimes possible to, through some online research, identify original manufacturers for some goods - thereby bypassing wholesalers and achieving a cheaper price. Computer platform-independent -'Many, if not most, computers have the ability to communicate via the Internet independent of operating systems and hardware. Customers are not limited by existing hardware systems' (Gascoyne & Ozcubukcu, 1997:87). Efficient applications development environment -'In many respects, applications can be more efficiently developed and distributed because the can be built without regard to the customer's or the business partner's technology platform. Application updates do not have to be manually installed on computers. Rather, Internet-related technologies provide this capability inherently through automatic deployment of software updates' (Gascoyne & Ozcubukcu, 1997:87). Allowing customer self service and 'customer outsourcing' -People can interact with businesses at any hour of the day that it is convenient to them, and because these interactions are initiated by customers, the customers also provide a lot of the data for the transaction that may otherwise need to be entered by business staff. This means that some of the work and costs are effectively shifted to customers; this is referred to as 'customer outsourcing'. Stepping beyond borders to a global view -Using aspects of ecommerce technology can mean your business can source and use products and services provided by other businesses in other countries. This seems obvious enough to say, but people do not always consider the implications of e-commerce. For example, in many ways it can be easier and cheaper to host and operate some e-commerce activities outside Australia. Further, because many e-commerce transactions involve credit cards, many businesses in Australia need to make arrangements for accepting online payments. However a number of major Australian banks have tended to be unhelpful laggards on this front, charging a lot of money and making it difficult to establish these arrangements - particularly for smaller businesses and/or businesses that don't fit into a traditional-economy understanding of business. In some cases, therefore, it can be easier and cheaper to set up arrangements which bypass this aspect of the Australian banking system. Admittedly, this can create some grey areas for legal and taxation purposes, but these can be dealt with. And yes these circumstances do have implications for Australia's national competitiveness and the competitiveness of our industries and businesses.

E-commerce disadvantages Some disadvantages of e-commerce include the following. 11

 Time for delivery of physical products -It is possible to visit a local music store and walk out with a compact disc, or a bookstore and leave with a book. E-commerce is often used to buy goods that are not available locally from businesses all over the world, meaning that physical goods need to be delivered, which takes time and costs money. In some cases there are ways around this, for example, with electronic files of the music or books being accessed across the Internet, but then these are not physical goods.  Physical product, supplier & delivery uncertainty -When you walk out of a shop with an item, it's yours. You have it; you know what it is, where it is and how it looks. In some respects e-commerce purchases are made on trust. This is because, firstly, not having had physical access to the product, a purchase is made on an expectation of what that product is and its condition. Secondly, because supplying businesses can be conducted across the world, it can be uncertain whether or not they are legitimate businesses and are not just going to take your money. It's pretty hard to knock on their door to complain or seek legal recourse! Thirdly, even if the item is sent, it is easy to start wondering whether or not it will ever arrive.  Perishable goods -Forget about ordering a single gelato ice cream from a shop in Rome! Though specialised or refrigerated transport can be used, goods bought and sold via the Internet tend to be durable and non-perishable: they need to survive the trip from the supplier to the purchasing business or consumer. This shifts the bias for perishable and/or non-durable goods back towards traditional supply chain arrangements, or towards relatively more local e-commercebased purchases, sales and distribution. In contrast, durable goods can be traded from almost anyone to almost anyone else, sparking competition for lower prices. In some cases this leads to disintermediation in which intermediary people and businesses are bypassed by consumers and by other businesses that are seeking to purchase more directly from manufacturers.  Limited and selected sensory information -The Internet is an effective conduit for visual and auditory information: seeing pictures, hearing sounds and reading text. However it does not allow full scope for our senses: we can see pictures of the flowers, but not smell their fragrance; we can see pictures of a hammer, but not feel its weight or balance. Further, when we pick up and inspect something, we choose what we look at and how we look at it. This is not the case on the Internet. If we were looking at buying a car on the Internet, we would see the pictures the seller had chosen for us to see but not the things we might look for if we were able to see it in person. And, taking into account our other senses, we can't test the car to hear the sound of the engine as it changes gears or sense the smell and feel of the leather seats. There are many ways in which the Internet does not convey the richness of experiences of the world. This lack of sensory information

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means that people are often much more comfortable buying via the Internet generic goods - things that they have seen or experienced before and about which there is little ambiguity, rather than unique or complex things. Returning goods -Returning goods online can be an area of difficulty. The uncertainties surrounding the initial payment and delivery of goods can be exacerbated in this process. Will the goods get back to their source? Who pays for the return postage? Will the refund be paid? Will I be left with nothing? How long will it take? Contrast this with the offline experience of returning goods to a shop. Privacy, security, payment, identity, contract -Many issues arise - privacy of information, security of that information and payment details, whether or not payment details (eg credit card details) will be misused, identity theft, contract, and, whether we have one or not, what laws and legal jurisdiction apply. Defined services & the unexpected -E-commerce is an effective means for managing the transaction of known and established services, that is, things that are everyday. It is not suitable for dealing with the new or unexpected. For example, a transport company used to dealing with simple packages being asked if it can transport a hippopotamus, or a customer asking for a book order to be wrapped in blue and white polka dot paper with a bow. Such requests need human intervention to investigate and resolve. Personal service -Although some human interaction can be facilitated via the web, e-commerce can not provide the richness of interaction provided by personal service. For most businesses, e-commerce methods provide the equivalent of an information-rich counter attendant rather than a salesperson. This also means that feedback about how people react to product and service offerings also tends to be more granular or perhaps lost using e-commerce approaches. If your only feedback is that people are (or are not) buying your products or services online, this is inadequate for evaluating how to change or improve your e-commerce strategies and/or product and service offerings. Successful business use of e-commerce typically involves strategies for gaining and applying customer feedback. This helps businesses to understand, anticipate and meet changing online customer needs and preferences, which is critical because of the comparatively rapid rate of ongoing Internet-based change. Size and number of transactions -E-commerce is most often conducted using credit card facilities for payments, and as a result very small and very large transactions tend not to be conducted online. The size of transactions is also impacted by the economics of transporting physical goods. For example, any benefits or conveniences of buying a box of pens online from a US-based business tend to be eclipsed by the cost of having to pay for them to be delivered to you in Australia. The delivery costs also mean that buying individual items from a range of

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different overseas businesses is significantly more expensive than buying all of the goods from one overseas business because the goods can be packaged and shipped together.

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Benefits Of Ecommerce E Commerce is one of the most important facets of the Internet to have emerged in the recent times. Ecommerce or electronic commerce involves carrying out business over the Internet with the assistance of computers, which are linked to each other forming a network. To be specific ecommerce would be buying and selling of goods and services and transfer of funds through digital communications. The benefits of Ecommerce:  Ecommerce allows people to carry out businesses without the barriers of time or distance. One can log on to the Internet at any point of time, be it day or night and purchase or sell anything one desires at a single click of the mouse.  The direct cost-of-sale for an order taken from a web site is lower than through traditional means (retail, paper based), as there is no human interaction during the on-line electronic purchase order process. Also, electronic selling virtually eliminates processing errors, as well as being faster and more convenient for the visitor.  Ecommerce is ideal for niche products. Customers for such products are usually few. But in the vast market place i.e. the Internet, even niche products could generate viable volumes.  Another important benefit of Ecommerce is that it is the cheapest means of doing business.  The day-to-day pressures of the marketplace have played their part in reducing the opportunities for companies to invest in improving their competitive position. A mature market, increased competitions have all reduced the amount of money available to invest. If the selling price cannot be increased and the manufactured cost cannot be decreased then the difference can be in the way the business is carried out. Ecommerce has provided the solution by decimating the costs, which are incurred.

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 From the buyer’s perspective also ecommerce offers a lot of tangible advantages. 1. Reduction in buyer’s sorting out time. 2. Better buyer descisions 3. Less time is spent in resolving invoice and order discrepancies. 4. Increased opportunities for buying alternative products.   The strategic benefit of making a business ‘ecommerce enabled’, is that it helps reduce the delivery time, labour cost and the cost incurred in the following areas: 1. Document preparation 2. Error detection and correction 3. Reconciliation 4. Mail preparation 5. Telephone calling 6. Data entry 7. Overtime 8. Supervision expenses Operational benefits of e commerce include reducing both the time and personnel required to complete business processes, and reducing strain on other resources. It’s because of all these advantages that one can harness the power of ecommerce and convert a business to ebusiness by using powerful turnkey ecommerce solutions made available by ebusiness solution providers

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Four Ecommerce Ingredients Many business owners who want to set up an ecommerce site get so involved with finding the right web developer but rarely know the right questions to ask. When you ask the right questions, you're more capable of selecting the right web developer for your ecommerce web site. Below is a list of four items to consider when starting your ecommerce business. 1. A shopping cart -There are many software shopping cart programs available today that empower you to add in your own products and manipulate the pricing, discounts, inventory, etc. without relying on your web developer. Especially if you plan to have over 20 products on your site, you'll want to select an easy to use shopping cart that has all the tools you need to manage your products. Consider the following when selecting your shopping cart • • • • • • • • • •

Can I upload my product images easily? Can I change my prices and offer discounts or promo codes? Do I need to integrate directly with UPS or another shipping company to calculate my shipping information? Does the software help me calculate sales tax? Can I group my products into categories? Can I select some products as featured products to show in a special section? Can I add features to products such as a size or color? Can I manage my product inventory through the software? Can I set up an auto responder email to send an email confirmation to all online customers? Does the shopping cart have a way of saving all customer data for my records?

2. Merchant Account -To sell anything online you'll need to consider how you'll collect money into your business bank account. Start by first contacting your bank

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to check their set up fees and prices for using their merchant account provider. Listen for a merchant account set up fee and payment gateway or online set up fee. Also listen for the per transaction fee and the discount rates. Decide whether you want to accept American Express and check the setup fee for accepting these cards. Some merchant accounts will charge more for credit cards with rewards programs, and apparently around 50% of cards these days have rewards programs. So make sure to ask about the discount rate for these kinds of cards. Check for monthly fees and make sure to ask for monthly minimum amounts. If you don't ask the questions, your provider will leave out important costly details. So if you don't like your bank's merchant account solution check with PayPal (which tends to be light on the set up fees but heavy on the discount rate), Charge.com, and providers who work with First Data. You have tons of options but not all are long standing companies. Choose your merchant account provider carefully. Some may keep you in year long commitments. 3. Payment Gateway -Your merchant account provider, once carefully selected, will work with a Payment Gateway. The Payment Gateway communicates the purchase order online through the merchant account to your bank. Popular payment gateways are Authorize.net and PayPal (which is a merchant account and gateway in one). Check to make sure that your web developer is comfortable with integrating your payment gateway with your shopping cart. Without a properly integrated payment gateway, your customers will be placing orders without fully paying you. 4. SSL certificate -An SSL certificate (Secure Socket Layer certificate) is the piece of the ecommerce pie that puts the yellow padlock and the https on your site to ensure to your customers that they're checking out with their credit card information in a secure environment. The installation of an SSL certificate is important as it sets up a data encryption process that prevents hackers from being able to steal your customers' credit card information. A smart online shopper will not proceed through checkout without first looking for the https (vs. http) or the padlock in the bottom right of the browswer window. Ask your merchant account provider if they have an SSL certificate for you to have your web programmer install on your site. If not, you can purchase them online. Check out rapidsslonline.com and thawt.com. You'll need to consider the annual cost of having an SSL certificate and the installation cost. Having an SSL certificate is a renewal service just like renewing your domain name ever year or every 5 years. With this information on the four ingredients to setting up your ecommerce business, you should have all the questions prepared to start working with the right web developer. Now you just need to make sure you like their design capabilities. I hope this helps your ecommerce business get off on the right foot...next is marketing.

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Ecommerce Tips For Beginners -How to "Fill the Need" For Giant Ecommerce Profits

The product or service that you would like to sell is the basis of your business. The commerce part is the action of the business. Ecommerce tips for beginners abound, but they rarely start by talking about the item you will be trying to sell. Generally, you can sell anything in an ecommerce format but selling something that people want or need is a better then selling something that is just a thing to sell. Advice givers will rarely come out and say this, instead relying on more advanced tips that sound important and some times are, but this is where to begin. What people want? Finding where the need lies is one of the first ecommerce tips for beginners that should be given. Start by carrying a pad and writing down a need when you try to do something unique, interesting or try to do that seems annoying or could be done easier. Ecommerce tips for beginners should be oriented toward the simple rather then complex. After all, it is usually the simple things that sell and the simple techniques that sell them. Would you buy this? One of the best ecommerce tips for beginners is to not be shy about your research. Remember that you are selling to people, not a computer screen. You may think a product is simple and fills a need, but does it? Do some research by stopping people on the street and asking a yes or no question. Would you buy a "enter your product here"?

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Ecommerce Tips For Beginners -For Doing Ecommerce Regardless of the project you are getting into, the first tip that anybody involved with the same type of project will give you is to enjoy what you are doing. Ecommerce tips for beginners are no different. If you do not enjoy what you are doing there is really no reason to start getting involved in the project in the first place. There are whole arrays of ecommerce tips for beginners but they would be pointless if you began the project and then stopped because you lost interest or just hated doing the work. Go slow from the start Ecommerce tips for beginners abound on the internet today. Be careful not to get caught up with all the books and programs you will see there. Continue doing what you are doing right now, until you start to get a sense of what the whole ecommerce thing is about. Then, if you feel the need, invest in one of the ebooks to find a few experienced based tips. Eventually, however, you may feel that you could write the book. Remain true to your customer Ecommerce tips for beginners often shoot the beginner straight into the marketing and commerce aspects of selling to quickly. Usually, the old marketing adage of KISS (keep it simple stupid) is a better piece of advice for the beginner rather then getting all wrapped up in the pricing and collateral advertising aspects of ecommerce. In the end; enjoying the process, your product and the fun of the chase are the best tips for anybody getting into the ecommerce game. They will show up in your end results.

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