- Web design and E-commerce
- Web design for E-commerce is a very delicate matter. Your design has to guide your customer to the order button without ever losing his intention to buy.
E-commerce in its simplest form is the following:
You have a site to sell a product. On your order page you say: Send a check and when we cashed it we will send the product.
Simple and straight-forward.
But Internetters are impulsive buyers. They don't want to write down your data, go offline, write a check, send it to
you and wait.
They want it NOW!
And you have to go to the bank with every check you receive, cash the money, go back and send the product to the right customer.
Besides that, what if you have several products? Do they have to order every product separately?
No, no, they won't do that.
- Shopping Carts.
- Your should include a shopping cart. This is a software program that lets your customer click on the
products they want to buy and store them in a 'basket'.
At the end of the shopping the basket shows the products bought including prices and grand totals.
Some shopping carts are free and can be found at the cgi resources.
- Credit Cards
- If you are serious about ecommerce you must be able to accept credit cards. The majority of your visitors will use this way to pay for your products. So if you can't offer credit card payment, you will lose sales.
There are two ways you can offer this service.
The first one is to get a merchant account and accept credit cards yourself.
You can apply for such an account at your own bank or through a broker. But I have to leave you alone here, because since I do not live in the US, I'm not able to get my own US merchant account. I've heard it can be very hard to get a merchant account and it can be quite expensive. Transaction expenses however can be as low as 1.5 to 3% per transaction.
You have to consider security topics (see below) and the card solution must work with the shopping card.
The second way is easier. Use a third party to collect credit card payments for you. Most of them do not have a
setup fee but they charge you 7 to 19% per transaction.
Many of them have their own Shopping Cart where you can define a few products. And they take care of security too.
If you have a small company or are selling low volumes (as every beginner does) this may be the way to go.
- Security
- Electronic commerce can be dangerous because customers provide online confidential (credit card) information.
To secure that information it must be encrypted. Therefore you have to use a Secure Server to send encrypted data.
Transmission takes a little bit longer because of the encryption. You can see that you are on a secure
server by the little lock on your browser and the extension of the html pages which change to shtml. The
technical term is SSL, Secure Sockets Layer, and is a protocol for authenticating and encrypting Internet
traffic.
- Authority
- THE Authority is Ralph Wilson. I mentioned him in the Marketing and Promotion topic. If you didn't sign up for his newsletter yet, please do yourself a favor. Do it now and also explore his site.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/
If you need excellent E-commerce information this is the site to go!
If you can't solve problems just send an Email:
E-commerce is Powerful!
Warm regards,
Case Stevens
Moderator
E-commerce Web Design - Top
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