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So what is ecommerce? Well, it is the term that means the selling of goods and service over the internet. It means even the creation of a website that promotes and advertises your products can be considered ecommerce. But today, ecommerce has become a very widely used term, and it also much more complicated. Today, ecommerce business have elaborate online shopping stores where customers can look through thousands of products, choose what they want, place an order, select the appropriate desired method, and then pay for the purchase by the use of credit cards. So do you want to set up an online store? This is a great way to extend your business online – and online sales are really shooting up nowadays. Plus, the market is huge as more and more people are gaining access to the internet, thus ecommerce is becoming a household name. So if you can afford to open an online store, go ahead – launch it and make the most of the information age. You don’t need much complicated software to open an online store – just use Hostway’s ecommerce plans – they will tell you all you need to know. In fact, you don’t even need to know how to use HTML to set up your online store – no Web programming is required. In your online store, you can sell any number of items – decide on how many, then pick your hosting plan.

There are certain things you need to know about ecommerce. For instance, you might be wondering how you are supposed to collect orders on your website, we tell you that most common method is to use to a simple online order form. You might alternatively use a shopping cart system with an order form. So this is how it works – your customer will complete the online order form, then the order is delivered to you via email, in a text file or it might even be saved to a database file on your website, which you can retrieve. When your receive your customer’s order, you can submit their credit card and payment information to your merchant count provider, and then deliver your service or product.

So now the obvious question is – when should you use a simple stand alone online order form, and when should you use a shopping cart system on your website? The answer is as simple as this. use a simple stand alone online order form if you have a small number of items available to purchase (less than 12 or 24 dozen unique products or services), if you want an inexpensive solution, if you have a limited internet budget, if you are a novice or an immediate web designer, if you want to start with a simple, uncomplicated easy to build order system. Similarly, use a shopping cart system if you have many items available for sale, and if you want to automatically total a customer’s order including tax and shipping.

When setting up your online store for ecommerce, you need to choose a hosting plan. What factors should you look into? Consider how your site and your product offerings may grow in the future, and also think about the advanced features and functionalities you might want to offer your customers. Perhaps you could provide a search feature that allows your customers to search for a specific item. Do choose a plan that accommodates your growth plans and your changing needs, because your customer base will most definitely expand, and your traffic will increase.

You would be surprised to know that for ecommerce, setting up an online store doesn’t cost all that much, so you don’t need to fear that you will go bankrupt. Basic plans range from 30 dollars approximately, to 100 dollars approximately, a month, but this depends on various factors like the number of items you want to sell, the anticipated traffic, and the features and functionalities you would like to provide to your customers. The good thing about being on a monthly billing schedule is that you can move your site at any time, and you wouldn’t have to pay a transfer or disconnection fee.

But there are other costs you need to consider, when it comes to an ecommerce online store. For example, you need to get a merchant account and a payment gateway service, to accept credit cards and process the transactions online. You need to think about initial setup fees, and also the ongoing costs for the services, not just the hosting services by themselves.

Wondering how long your ecommerce store will take to go online? Well, just place your order online with a credit card, and then you can start building your store within 24 to 72 hours. This means the time required to activate your domain name and spread the information round about the physical location of your site on the Internet. Building the site doesn’t take long, once you start – if you are offering just a few products, and then give it an hour or so. But most stores usually take at least a few hours and even several days.

When it comes to ecommerce, you might be wondering what options you have for handling transactions. Well, you have quite a few options. The basic thing to do would be to handle the transactions offline – publish your address and have the customers send their orders with a check or money order to you directly. You might also consider collecting their credit card information via email or phone, and then you could process the credit card transactions with your retail merchant account.  But we suggest doing it all online – you should be able to accept and process credit card transactions online in real time. For this, you need a payment gateway service, an SSL certificate, and an internet ready merchant account.

Let’s talk about ecommerce, in this article, we shall tell you what ecommerce is all about.

From the decade of the 1990’s, the concept of ecommerce would include data mining, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning systems, and a good example of the use of ecommerce in physical goods would the Boston Computer Exchange – which was a marketplace launched in 1982, for used computers. The American Information Exchange was an early online information marketplace; it was also an online system that was introduced in 1991.

In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and thus an academic telecommunication network was transformed into a worldwide communication system for even the laymen. However, up until 1991, commercial enterprise was prohibited on the internet. In 1994, the internet became popular when the first online shopping started, but of course you must take into account the introduction of DSL and security protocols, which allowed continued connection to the Internet. By the time the new millennium rolled around, many European and American business companies had started offering their services online, through the World Wide Web – and then ecommerce as a concept began to be associated with the ability to buy goods and services through the Internet, through secure protocols and electronic payment services.

Many applications commonly use ecommerce – like newsgroups, email, electronic tickets, enterprise content management, online banking, online office suites, instant messaging, online shopping and order tracking, domestic and international payment systems, teleconferencing, shopping cart software, etc.

However, ecommerce has met with its share of regulation. For instance, in the United States, some ecommerce activities are being regulated by the Federal Trade Commission – which includes the use of commercial emails, online advertising, and consumer privacy. There is also the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which has established national standards for regulating the direct marketing over email. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission Act regulates all forms of advertising – like online advertising, and says that all advertising should be truthful and not deceptive in any way. Security of personal information falls under this.

Today, ecommerce involves quite a lot of things from ordering digital content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, one may also include meta services to facilitate other kinds of ecommerce. If we are talking about the consumer level, ecommerce is generally conducted on the World Wide Web. You could go online to buy basically anything – books, music, groceries, clothes, or even real estate. Even online banking falls under ecommerce – buying stocks, transferal of funds from one account to another, and also online bill payment. All you need to do is log on, and these forms of ecommerce are right in front of you. Ecommerce is also present at the institutional level – as in, large corporations and financial institutions use the internet to exchange financial data for the facilitation of domestic and international business. When it comes to ecommerce, data integrity and security are very important issues.

You might be having a lot of questions about ecommerce. In this article, we shall discuss some of the common doubts that people have.

Maybe you are wondering how you can accept credit card orders on your website. Well, for that, you need some basic elements to be able to accept online orders via credit card – a credit card merchant account with a bank, a method by which to collect the orders and the credit card information (either order forms or shopping cart system), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Encryption – which will provide your customers a safe and secure method by which they can transmit their credit card and order information from you. Now what is a credit card merchant account? Well, put simply – it means that your business can accept credit cards in lieu of payment for goods and services. For example, a customer will provide his or her credit card number when a sale is made. What you do is this – you submit the credit card number, the expiration date, and the amount of the sale made to your merchant account provider (which may be typically a bank). And within a few days, the funds are electronically deposited to your business bank account.

So how can you get a credit card merchant account? Well, merchant account services are offered by most financial institutions, and also by banks. All you need to do is check with your current bank, and ask for an application form. You would also be interested to know that there are companies that specialize in providing merchant account services and also the lease and sale of credit card terminals, processing software, etc. You can find these companies in the phone book, or even search online for “merchant account providers”. The fees tend to vary from provider to provider, so take the time to compare before choosing.

Now we shall talk about real time credit card processing – this means that your web order pages are immediately submitting your customer’s credit card information to your merchant bank account for authorization, via the internet. This is useful if you think that much online transactions will be made, or if you want to give your customers immediate access to your services and products. Let’s take an example – selling software that a customer can download immediately, right after the credit card payment has been authorized real time. The functionality of real time credit card processing may mean that you have to pay additional costs beyond the standard processing – these include additional service fees from your merchant account provider bank, additional software requirements for real time processing, customized ordering pages which are created for your website, and web server payment gateway software configuration and setup. It is advisable that you do some careful planning and research before you launch the real time payment system on your website, do look into the total costs and the expected return on investment.