ECommerce - What You Need To Know To Succeed

What Do You Need to Get Your Ecommerce Site Up and Running?

This lense discusses ecommerce issues and tools that you would need to use to have a fully functional e-commerce site. Miss these things and you could be setting yourself up for failure.

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9 Things You Must Do If You Want To Have A Successful Ecommerce Web Site

E-commerce is a growing strategy that more and more businesses are realizing is necessary to have as part of their business model. Unfortunately it can be a complicated solution that requires knowledge of many back-end functional components that most entrepreneurs aren't familiar with.

Read on to discover the specific components that are required to create an ecommerce web site. It will discuss what the components are, and what they do.

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Determine a good business name for your e-commerce store and then purchase a domain name for the name of your store. The name should have a keyword that people would use to find your products and/or services.
Sign up with a quality web hosting provider. It should have at least one SQL database, and can do server side scripting, such as SHTML, PHP, and/or CGI scripting and at least 300Mb of space.
Use a good shopping cart. The shopping cart needs to do the following:

1) Allow multiple simultaneous users.
2) Keep a running total of the costs.
3) Finalize the order.
Create a good database - The database is usually used to:

1) Keep customer data
2) Create customer personalization
3) Keep product data
4) Hold shopping cart contents
5) Integrate with other systems
Accept credit cards.

You will want the ability to accept credit cards. Sure, you can run an ecommerce business by using fax, and/or requiring people to send in your checks, but you will be leaving a lot of money on the table if you don't accept credit cards in one form or another.
Use a secure socket layer -
A secure socket layer encrypts the data between the customer's computer and your web server. It keeps prying eyes from sneaking a peek at sensitive data, such as credit card info.
Use a payment gateway -
A payment gateway collects the credit card info and sales info (price, customer info, etc.) and does some sort of basic fraud check, to make sure the credit card isn't stolen, etc.
It charges the customer's credit card and deposits the money into your bank account.
Acquire a merchant account

A merchant account allows your business to charge sales to credit cards. It is basically a type of agreement between your business and a bank.
Get a separate business bank account

You will need a bank account that will accept the deposits for the credit card charges. As with most everything else, business bank accounts vary in features and costs based upon the servicing bank.