Entering the World of Ecommerce

A Home Business Article Contributed by Elizabeth Fox-Wise

Building an Ecommerce Site

There are several things you should keep in mind when building an ecommerce site.

Suppliers - this is no different from building any other time of business which will sell product. Without good suppliers, your ecommerce business can not offer products.

Your Price Point - one of the reasons shopping online is favored by so many people, is the ease with which they can compare prices at several ecommerce sites. Therefore, your price point will be even more important in an ecommerce business.

Customer Relations - ecommerce offers a variety of different ways for you to communicate with your customers. Emails, FAQs, Chat rooms and live help are the more commonly used.

The Back End - Fulfillments, Returns, Customer Services - these things can make or break any retail business - including ecommerce.

Implementing an Ecommerce Site

OK, you want to create an ecommerce site. There are three different ways which you can implement your site.

These include

Enterprise computing

Virtual hosting services

Simplified ecommerce

Enterprise Computing means that you purchase software and hardware and hire a team of developers to create your ecommerce site for you. You might want to consider Enterprise Computing if your ecommerce site has a large volume of visitors or a huge or changing product base.

Virtual Hosting Services gives you some of the flexibility of Enterprise Computing but not as much control. The end product is up to the vendor. The vendor maintains the equipment and software and sells them in standardized packages.

Simplified ecommerce is what most small businesses and individuals use to enter into the world of ecommerce. In this case, the vendor provides a simplified system for creating your ecommerce store. The system typically involves forms that you can fill out online. The vendor's software will then generates all of the web pages for the ecommerce store for you.

Running an Ecommerce Site

Now that you have your ecommerce site built and implemented it is important to keep it running smoothly. Although your business exists in the "virtual world" instead of the "real world" this does not make the business itself any less real. You are still competing with the "big giants" in the retail world, only now there are more of them!

If you open a store in your town, your major competitors might be Walmart and Sears - but in an ecommerce business not only are you competing with them, but also with the ecommerce giants such as Amazon and Overstock.

Your customers will not expect any less of you because you are a small ecommerce business and, indeed, you will actually have to give more and better to get them to come back again. Walmart and Sears already has their following of loyal customers, your start up ecommerce business has yet to build its customers base. To get loyal, repeat customers you will need to provide better service, better prices and a better shopping experience than they can find with other merchants.