Ecommerce the Way to Go

A Home Business Article Contributed by Marsha Maung

Ecommerce the Way to Go!

Have you ever thought about starting your own home business and exploring the possibility of running your own ecommerce store? Have you ever thought about having customers who buy from your store that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Have you ever thought about never having to leave the home to man your retail outlet? That's the very essence of an ecommerce business.

The 'e' in Ecommerce

The 'e' in ecommerce stands for electronic. Commerce stands for an entity that makes money - generally speaking. So, having an ecommerce business simply means that you are running a business, managing an entity that makes money through the Internet. The ecommerce word is also often replaced with words like 'eshopping' and 'online merchant' and many other variations but essentially, they're all doing the same thing. Ecommerce sounds much harder than it really is and many people get intimidated when they hear the word.

Ecommerce Benefits

There are many benefits of running and online store or an ecommerce store. The manager or person running the ecommerce store never have to leave home or even change out of their pajamas to start the business online. With a website, domain name and hosting account, an enterpreneur can start the business instantly. Well, almost.

The ecommerce business will run by itself regardless of time zone. There are also no boundaries for your ecommerce business - people anywhere can visit your store anytime, anywhere and they don't have to be in the same physical location as you are! They only need a computer, an Internet connection, a web browser and that's it - they can buy things from your online store!

Payment Methods for Your Ecommerce Store

There are many benefits to having more than 1 type of payment method that you accept through your ecommerce business. You can accept offline payment methods, like wire transfers, money orders, cashier checks, and direct bank-ins. But it would be better for you if your ecommerce business accepts online payments through credit cards, debit cards and charge cards. Maybe you can even consider implementing other payment methods like paypal.com and ikobo.com which are online payment processing systems.

And setting it up is really easy and free too. The only thing you have to consider is giving the payment processing party a commission or interest for processing your payments. Most payment processors like www.paypal.com and www.ikobo.com allows you to setup your own 'pay now' buttons that you can place in your website to enable your customers to make payments from their credit, debit and charge cards directly into your paypal or ikobo accounts.

Free Website for Your Ecommerce Store

Free webhosting and domain name companies like geocities, tripod, freeservers...etc are wonderful for personal homepages, blogs and personal publication of articles. However, if you're planning to run your home business based on this ecommerce store you're setting up, forget about using these free hosting and domain names. First of all, if you're serious about your new ecommerce business, then you would invest a little of your time and money on getting your own domain name and hosting account.

They're not expensive at all and is relatively easy to purchase. If you want others to be serious about your own business, this is the investment you have to make.