ECommerce: The Basics

Ecommerce is a fancy term for selling products or services on the Internet. You can sell products on your own web site using a shopping cart or a Pay Pal button. You can use other web sites to sell or market your products. If you're brand new to the idea, here are some of the things you'll need to address in order to get started:

To add a product to your web site, or another site, such as Ebay, you'll need certain information about the product in order to tell the buyer about it, make sure shipping is calculated correctly, and payment is made correctly.

THE PRODUCT: You'll need to have a unique ID number, a title to identify it to buyers, weight and measurements, a description, images and other items.

SECURITY: when buyers give personal information, they expect their transaction to be secure. You'll need something called an SSL certificate which encrypts their data, making it safe to use your site. They run around 20 to 40 dollars and can be issued by any number of companies. The certificate will protect certain pages of your site, and you'll see an "https" at the beginning of the page name, which tells you that page is secure.

SHIPPING: you'll need to determine what shipping service and what types of shipping (overnight, 3 day, etc.) you want to offer your buyers.

PAYMENT: in order for the web site to process credit cards automatically, you need two things: a payment processor (a gateway between your site and your bank account) and a merchant account. A payment gateway handles the processing of the transaction, approving the card and handling the money transfer. A merchant account is an online bank account that receives payments for you through electronic mediums like credit cards. It's like a virtual bank account that receives electronic money.

ADMINISTRATION: shopping carts all have administrative areas, where you login using a username and password. Here you can view, edit and delete orders and customers, configure shipping and many other tasks.