CRITICAL COMPONENTS FOR E-COMMERCE ON THE WEB

Website
Your online connection to your prospects and customers. There are a number of places on the web to get "free" websites - although you may be required to display an advertisement. The design of your site is critical to the success of your business! If it does not look like a professional, legitimate business - NO ONE WILL ORDER ANYTHING - no matter how great the products you have. If you are serious about doing business on the web, either go back to school and learn html, java, cgi, etc., or hire a professional to designyour site.

Shopping Cart
Software which allows you to accept product orders for multiple products from your website. This software automatically calculates and totals orders for your customers. Some setup must be done in the html code of your website, and the shopping cart software must be installed on the server which hosts your site or on the secure server which accepts sensitive ordering information.

Merchant Account
Bank authorized account which allows you to accept major credit cards, electronic checks, etc. Many banks will not give you a merchant account if you do business on the internet because they may classify it as high risk. Be careful when looking for a merchant account provider! Watch out for hidden fees, high setup fees, and other unscrupulous business practices.

Payment Transaction Software - Electronic Gateway (Authorize.net)
Software which actually processes customer order information, address, credit card number, etc. The data is sent to a credit card authorization network which verifies that the credit card is valid and verifies that the shipping address matches the billing address. A possible warning sign that the card has been stolen is that the billing and shipping addresses do not match.

Web Site Marketing
You can take all the steps on this page to make your ecommerce project a success and still fail. The internet has gotten so large and so competitive...you HAVE to take steps to market and advertise your online business the very same way that you would have to advertise a bricks and morter retail outlet. If you know that advertising and marketing is the lifeblood of a retail locaiton, then please know that the same is true of an online venture...and the ways and mean to reach your prospective customers are many and varied...read more about it here...


To understand how the money actually flows from a customer to a merchant's bank account, see this: