Making Ecommerce Work for You

A Home Business Article Contributed by Alina Sandor

What is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce is the selling of products over the Internet with actual purchases, not just advertising. Ecommerce can be a major force in your business, taking it from small potatoes to big bucks. It takes no building to have a store and doesn't take any cashiers. Everything is done electronically over the internet, paying with a credit card (the customer enters account information via the computer) or with a previously established "cybercash" account, such as Paypal. The purchase information is sent to a bank for payment clearance and back to you so that you can fill the order fulfillment.

What is So Great about Ecommerce?

An ecommerce transaction is handy for both you and the customer. The customer can shop from the comfort of her home, and the you don't have to have a "traditional" brick and mortar store to sell your product. By having a virtual store using ecommerce you are saving massive amounts of money, as well as saving time.

What Does it Take to Start an Ecommerce Site?

You will need several things to set up a ecommerce store on the internet.

First, you need an ecommerce website. The website will need to have pictures of your merchandise as well as descriptions of the products and price.

Then you will need to ad a shopping cart system such as Cart32 5.0, Miva Merchant or the Hostway Merchant Manager to make ecommerce transactions possible. Shopping cart systems are storefront managers for ecommerce Web servers. It contains all the tools needed to develop and manage your ecommerce store, including, cataloging, unlimited product listings, order fulfillment, inventory management, keeping track of customer's orders for them and more.

You will also need a way to accept payment. There are two ways to start ecommerce. An Internet-ready merchant account allows you to accept credit cards online, and a secure payment gateway system is just like ATMs. The only difference is that it works with your shopping cart software. It is designed to read the information from order forms and translate it for the ecommerce merchant account. Both of these handle fraud checks on each transaction as well as the transfer of funds from your customer's credit card to your ecommerce business account.

Next you will need to get traffic to your new store. Attaching Meta tags to your site is the first step to getting customers. Meta tags allow search engines to know what your site is so that it can bring it up in searches. You will also have to submit your site to search engines so that customers can easily find you.

To get a higher ranking, your website should be loaded with keywords, or words that people will most likely type in when searching for a site like yours. Keywords go hand-in-hand with meta tags so when you are learning how to implement one into your site you should learn how to use the other as well.

Having a traffic counter will also let you know how many people are visiting your site.