Turnkey Ecommerce Solutions
A Home Business Article Contributed by Marina Parker
What is a Turnkey Ecommerce Solution
A turnkey ecommerce or Ecommerce or E-commerce solution (depending on your preference for capitalization or not) basically means that you pay a third-party to develop your business' presence on the Internet. That means that turnkey ecommerce is another way of saying that you pay someone else to build, set up, maintain, and if appropriate, market your Web-based business. Sounds expensive? It can be. The choice is yours.
Main Components of a Turnkey Ecommerce Solution
A turnkey solution can never truly deliver what it promises. You can't just turn the key (as the name implies) and what the system rise from the machine. Your participation in developing the turnkey ecommerce site will be critical to ensuring that what is developed by the solution provider meets your ecommerce needs. Turnkey solution providers will (to various levels of complexity) work with you to do the following:
1. Build a ecommerce site - you'll can pick from hundreds of available templates or pay them more to build one from scratch
2. Select/Configure Servers - servers are the databases/tables you'll need to store the information about the products you sell as well
as the invoice/order history of the items you've sold.
3. Establish your web hosting services - once your Website is on the Internet, it will need to be monitored and maintained. In other words, someone will need to ensure that the site is always up and available, that the databases are properly backed-up, that the email accounts and messages are properly administered, and more. You don't want to do this yourself - unless you are going to house and administer the application, web, and database servers on your own site.
4. Set up your ecommerce shopping cart - this is the tools your clients will use to pay for the products/services they're ordering. This may include payment or credit card processing services like PayPal or Verisign. The less you have to do, the better here. Otherwise, you or your staff will have to be constantly online to process email orders, manually.
5. Ensure Your Turnkey Ecommerce Site's WWW visibility - your business can only succeed if people come to it. That's called "traffic". To increase your client traffic (clicks), you must find a way for potential clients to find their way to your ecommerce site. This type of marketing is accomplished by using keywords to increase search engine hits.
In other words, your ecommerce site must be quickly found by search engine queries, and special keywords must be used to ensure that the relevancy of the keywords found on your site bring your ecommerce site's name to the top part of the search results list. The more relevant the keywords found - the higher your turnkey ecommerce site will appear on the list.
Some Common Providers of Turnkey Ecommerce Solutions
Turnkey ecommerce site providers come in all sizes. The following provides a small, but definitely not complete, list of some of big, better known, and not-so known players in this field. Don't limit yourself to just these - search, research, and call before deciding on the best company to build your Turnkey Ecommerce solution.
1. Microsoft Small Business Center (http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/bc/default.mspx)
2. IBM Small Business Solutions (http://www-1.ibm.com/businesscenter/smb/us/en/busop)
3. Haven Internet Services (www.haveninternet.com)
4. Yahoo.com (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/)
5. FatCow.com (http://www.fatcow.com/index.html)
6. 1and1.com (http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Home;jsessionid=87D7A59B0AAADC02C9E41A28CE0D1E3C.TC63a? __frame=_top)
7. netfirms.com (http://www.netfirms.com/)
