The word commerce is usually defined as trading on a large scale. Very basically, e-commerce is the ability to sell products and/or services using electronic methods of shopping and payment.
An HTML form posts all of the information needed to process a transaction to your vendor's transaction server. Once the transaction server gets all of the transaction information, the transaction is processed. After the transaction is processed, it communicates the result back to your website, which communicates with the customer, and makes appropriate changes to your database (if inventory control is used).
How Much is it going to cost?
Here are some general tips for on-line costs:
Setup fees: There is generally no setup fees for online shopping.
Transaction fees: This is typically a percentage of each transaction that is paid to the merchant account provider/credit card companies. Fees vary. A fee of 2.59% is good for online transactions. PayPal charges 2.2%. and no set-up fee. This has made it a popular choice for small businesses or those with only a small number of products to offer.
Monthly fees: There is usually some "gateway fee" associated with online transactions to process cedit cards on your website by yourgateway merchant. $25 or less is in the ball park.
What do you need to get Started?
To get started with real-time transaction processing, you need the following:
At this time, the only license requirements are local license requirements. If you sell tangible products from your local store, the same reporting and licensing requirements are in effect. You will be required to collect sales tax for sales made to buyers from your state and report those taxes the same as for your local business.
For the Customer on your site it should mean: See > Click > Purchase. A No hassle buying experience.
For you it also means a way to reduce costs and risks of doing business on line.
The primary goal of creating a successful e-commerce site is to "Simplify" the process for both buyer and seller. Users generally like a "one click" process. At any point in the buying process the customer should be able to "check out" or "check the account status" or click to any other category in the site (even the home page).
For larger sites "search capabilities" are a must. Your customer should be able to search by product, product number, and category as an example allowing for quick retrieval of information.
Information about the site's security methods is necessary to instill confidence in your customer. For larger sites, it is preferable to have a system that keeps track of users, greets them with a personal message and allows the ability to offer them related products either through email or by directing them to other areas of the website. This should be done so as to provide this as a helpful experience rather than annoying.
We can build your ecommerce solution which includes a content management system and order processing system starting at $850.00. Click here if you are ready to get started.