Ecommerce:

Overview

A shopping cart system keeps track of the user’s order while they are shopping. When they finish shopping and are ready to submit their order, it is sent securely by the SSL to the payment gateway. The credit card is verified for the amount charged, and the funds are transferred to the merchant’s account.

The merchant account allows you to accept credit cards, your hosting company shows your website to the world, your shopping cart allows your customers to shop, the SSL certificate protects your user’s financial data, and the payment gateway allows real-time processing. All these components must work together to process credit card transactions online.

As a business owner, it is important before adding ecommerce to decide how you are going to process orders and how you are going to accept payments. There are a variety of ways.

Processing orders:
  • Simple non-secure order form sent to your email.
  • Secure order form sent to your email.
  • Shopping Cart System with database.
  • Using a 3rd party Shopping Cart Service, like PayPal.
Accepting Payments:
  • Checks, COD’s and Bank Drafts
  • Manual Credit Card processing
  • Real Time Credit Card Authorizations
  • Third Party Merchant Account like PayPal

Depending on what you decide, you are going to need different tools to set up your Order Processing and Payment System.

Additional General Thoughts:
  • Statistics on the reach of ecommerce indicate exponential rise in onddne profits since 2004
  • Many types of businesses benefit from ecommerce (anyone with a retail business, especially manufacturers with niche markets, and service businesses that are not geographically based)
  • Barriers to entry — on-hand cash, ability to process volume transactions quickly, shipping considerations
  • Timeline for seeing profits — depends on marketing efforts and profits from product sales — some people see profit the first month, others take a year or so
  • Suggestions for driving traffic to the ecommerce site — use of paid ads on Google, Yahoo, MSN, creating web friendly pages, using newsletters, blogs and forums to promote the site