Introduction To Ecommerce:
Many people new to websites and ecommerce are confused at the in and outs of ecommerce. Even many people who are fairly adept at scripting can set up a store using some popular package such as OSCommerce and then are left stumped by the idea of making it work with a payment gateway to actually collect money and put it into their account. In this article, I will give a brief overview of how the system is set up to collect your money. I will then discuss briefly what to look for in evaluating payment gateways.
Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the site owner's perspective, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank. In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website OR Paypal, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway. This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds. The payment gateway will then report back a successful transaction to the merchant, at which point the merchant's shopping cart system will respond by displaying a "Thank You" type message to the buyer. Funds will sit until the transaction is settled, which means the funds are collected and deposited to your bank account. Until a transaction is settled, the transaction will not post to your bank account and the corresponding debit will not post to the buyer's credit card account.
7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site:
Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does this mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.
1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.
2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.
3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.
4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live customer support to your site.
5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.
6: Shopping Carts
People want the checkout process to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.
7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.
Ecommerce Turnkey Sites:
Turnkey host sites normally offer the complete package, which normally includes hosting as well as products. Turnkey means an already stocked business, depending on the store it might be stocked with from 10 products to thousands.
These hosts usually charge a setup fee to create your store. A domain name may or may not be included in the price and there is usually a monthly fee for maintaining your store.
Some stores provide you with products at a base price and allow you to add your own markup. Others charge a fee for each product sold while others simply pay you a commission off each item sold. You choose what best suits you, but you will make the largest profit from those that you can markup yourself. Do not be lured buy quick promises of up to 50% commission. Often times months down the line you are still waiting on your first cheque as you have not sold anything. Sometime these products are very expensive or of such a quality that your customers will not buy.
Another thing some hosts fail to tell is that you have to promote the store yourself. So get ready, in addition to paying a monthly fee, you will have to start driving traffic to your website. This can prove costly but there are ways around it, such as through site optimization and site submissions.
One of the greatest things about these turnkey hosting packages however is that you do not need to hold inventory. All your products are pre-stocked and for some hosts, you do not even need to worry about accepting payment. Everything is taken care of, these services are usually all included in the monthly fee. This does seem to make your transition into the world of ecommerce a little easier but does not guarantee you the best monetary remuneration.
