E-commerce. This word did not exist before the Internet. What is the definition of it?
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-comm, 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 – Wikipedia
Ecommerce is all about selling on the web. Unlike ‘information’, e-comm uses a different approach, and must have technology and important security and verification options in place to enable credit card purchases and payment transactions online.
If you want to sell products on the internet through your web site, there are two options available to you.
The first is to provide potential customers with your personal contact info, so that they can call, e-mail, or send payment through regular mail in order to make a purchase (offline).
The second, which many vendors find more convenient, is placing a shopping cart, and enabling “add to cart” buttons on your site (online).
Setting up a retail page with a shopping cart can be done in several convenient steps, so you can be selling products online in no time at all.
Here are the 7 steps or considerations to look at when implementing a shopping cart for your website.
- Identify your products. Before starting you must know what you are going to sell, and when it comes to internet sales, the more products available – the better.
- Organize your products. Group them into logical categories for easy presentation and exploration.
- Upload pictures of your products. People want to see what they are purchasing, and nicer pictures means more sales.
- List your products in a simple and easy-to-understand way to keep potential buyers focused. For SEO, try to make the product descriptions unique, and keyword rich.
- Decide on shipping details. This includes shipping rates as well as shipping methods, which may need customization as you choose to ship to different parts of the world.
- Decide how you will accept payment from customers. Popular online payment methods include credit cards and PayPal. The safest payment methods are done through a Merchant Account and Gateway.
- Order your shopping cart. There are many shopping cart providers that will set up custom modifications to make sure your shopping cart is working just as you want it to.
Some popular shopping cart providers include Ecommerce Templates, which provide these services at a price around $150. www.3dcart.com is also popular, and https://www.magentocommerce.com/ is an open source shopping cart system. Most hosting companies (Godaddy, BlueHost, DreamHost) have solutions to help you with your ecommerce needs as well.
Now that you see how simple it is to get a shopping cart on your web site, what are you waiting for?
Related articles to website shopping carts
- Steps to Starting an eCommerce Business (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
- Essential Features of Shopping Cart Software (e1evation.com)