E-Commerce - Choosing a location

     Just as with a bricks-and-mortar store, the location of your Web store is critical to its success.

     Perhaps the easiest of all e-commerce sites to implement is to simply offer goods or services for sale on a secured part of a Web site. Most commercial Web sites can be adapted for basic e-commerce fairly easily by adding simple HTML forms to accept orders and linking to a secure server to accept credit card payments. For this type of site we recommend Marketers Choice for its ease of use and price.

     Once you move beyond the most rudimentary of Web stores, software products to support e-commerce applications require a great deal of customization, and few sellers have the skills required for such work. A commerce server must link a buyer, seller and transaction authorization agency, and pulling all these players together effectively can be a difficult task.

     For these reasons, many sellers chose to out source all or part of their Web store. How much of your store you chose to out source will depend on the nature of your business and the availability of relevant skills within your organization, but here are the options:

• Out sourcing of payment authorization and processing
  The major part of your Web store is located on your own or your ISPs server. Once a customer has placed an order you link to an external service to authorize and process credit card payments.
• Out-sourcing of the complete Web store
  Your complete Web store is created and maintained on a commerce server which manages the whole process from displaying goods through processing orders and payments. All you have to do is ship the goods.

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Choosing a Location

Laying the Foundation

Designing the Store

Receiving Orders

Getting Paid

Keeping it Secure

Promotion

Resources

Laying a Foundation

     The heart of any Web store is the software that it runs on. Up until relatively recently software solutions for Web stores were largely do-it-yourself efforts, consisting of a number of tools lashed together to fulfill the major tasks of a Web store.

     Now a new class of products, known as Web storefront creation packages or commerce servers, is emerging. These products, working with existing Web servers and legacy applications, provide tools for calculating taxes and shipping costs, work with a variety of payment schemes, and process transactions securely. Most provide site analysis and reporting tools for monitoring your site's progress. Finally, many provide wizards or libraries of sample storefronts, as well as authoring tools, to help developers build the site quickly.

     From a customer's perspective, they allow visitors to register, log on, browse products, place products in virtual shopping carts, and purchase the goods or services securely.

     If you are running your own Web server, you will have a large and growing list of packages to choose from.

     However, if you intend having an ISP host your Web store then your choice will be more limited. Most ISPs offering access to a commerce server have usually selected one software company to partner with and only offer their solution. In this case it would be best to identify what packages you are interested in and establish which ISPs will support you.

     Alternatively, many ISPs allow the use of CGI scripts on their servers and there are a number of ready made CGI scripts available that fulfill many of the required functions of a commerce server. Although use of these scripts is often free of charge there are some limitations to their usefulness. Firstly, most of them are written in a programming language called PERL which, although relatively easy to learn does have some speed limitations and therefore is only really suited for use in Web stores with light to medium traffic. Secondly, some scripts rely heavily on the use of cookies which some Web users regard as a threat to their privacy and are therefore probably best avoided.

     Finally, if you want to quickly establish a Web store and have limited or no HTML skills, there are a number of inexpensive storefront creation programs available, usually hosted by the vendor or a partner ISP. These entry-level products typically provide wizards that walk you through the process of setting up a Web store and then generate the site automatically.

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Choosing a Location

Laying the Foundation

Designing the Store

Receiving Orders

Getting Paid

Keeping it Secure

Promotion

Resources