How To Set Up An E-Store
Ecommerce and its rapid advances have opened up immense and infinite possibilities on the web.
One of the most successful ecommerce initiatives is to sell products and services over the web through electronic ecommerce stores or popularly known e-stores.
With innumerable quality ecommerce applications available, setting up an e-store is simple.
Yet prudence and caution would help one to set up a successful e-store rather quickly.
An e-store consists of critical components like product catalogs, shopping carts, payment gateways dealing with credit authorization/payment processing, order monitoring, shipping, inventory management etc.
There are softwares available for these components.
Freeware, Open source, customized and commercial/licensed software categories are available.
Choice of Products/services First determine the choice of products or services or both that the e-store is going to deal in.
Ecommerce Platform This is the most important, the most important, component of an e-store.
Choose it wisely.
The market is flooded with so many ecommerce softwares.
Shopping Cart Tools Shopping Cart tools are available in different types.
The conventional CGI shopping cart is one.
Though easy to use, it consumes lot of bandwidth and other resources.
The CGI/Cookie shopping cart is another choice.
The only limitation here is that this is supported by only browsers that support cookies.
The next one is the Java applet based shopping cart.
There is another alternative which is Java Script/Cookie shopping cart.
The limitation is that this works best in browsers that support Java and cookies.
Product Catalogues Product catalogues are the basic requirement of an e-store.
Product catalog tool must support grouping, special offers, price and product-based indexing and a lot of other functions.
Products display is a must in this tool.
Payment Gateways Reliable and trustworthy payment gateways contribute to the success of any e-store.
The crucial credit authorization, payment processing, financial accounting and such other very important functions are carried out through these payment gateways.
Choose a reputed payment gateway.
Shipping Timely order processing, shipping, and deliveries on schedule go a long way in helping build a reputable image to the e-store.
Order processing must be on the dot and at all cost delivery schedules must be adhered to.
Inventory Inventory control is part of the good practices and management strategy in the running of an e-store.
Inventory updating, identification of obsolete products and maintenance of inventory at optimum levels are all part of inventory control and management.
Once the chosen softwares and tools are downloaded and installed, the e-store is up and running in no time.
The e-store can be hosted inside the already launched enterprise website.
Front-end and back-end administrations are possible through reputed ecommerce platforms.
One of the most successful ecommerce initiatives is to sell products and services over the web through electronic ecommerce stores or popularly known e-stores.
With innumerable quality ecommerce applications available, setting up an e-store is simple.
Yet prudence and caution would help one to set up a successful e-store rather quickly.
An e-store consists of critical components like product catalogs, shopping carts, payment gateways dealing with credit authorization/payment processing, order monitoring, shipping, inventory management etc.
There are softwares available for these components.
Freeware, Open source, customized and commercial/licensed software categories are available.
Choice of Products/services First determine the choice of products or services or both that the e-store is going to deal in.
Ecommerce Platform This is the most important, the most important, component of an e-store.
Choose it wisely.
The market is flooded with so many ecommerce softwares.
Shopping Cart Tools Shopping Cart tools are available in different types.
The conventional CGI shopping cart is one.
Though easy to use, it consumes lot of bandwidth and other resources.
The CGI/Cookie shopping cart is another choice.
The only limitation here is that this is supported by only browsers that support cookies.
The next one is the Java applet based shopping cart.
There is another alternative which is Java Script/Cookie shopping cart.
The limitation is that this works best in browsers that support Java and cookies.
Product Catalogues Product catalogues are the basic requirement of an e-store.
Product catalog tool must support grouping, special offers, price and product-based indexing and a lot of other functions.
Products display is a must in this tool.
Payment Gateways Reliable and trustworthy payment gateways contribute to the success of any e-store.
The crucial credit authorization, payment processing, financial accounting and such other very important functions are carried out through these payment gateways.
Choose a reputed payment gateway.
Shipping Timely order processing, shipping, and deliveries on schedule go a long way in helping build a reputable image to the e-store.
Order processing must be on the dot and at all cost delivery schedules must be adhered to.
Inventory Inventory control is part of the good practices and management strategy in the running of an e-store.
Inventory updating, identification of obsolete products and maintenance of inventory at optimum levels are all part of inventory control and management.
Once the chosen softwares and tools are downloaded and installed, the e-store is up and running in no time.
The e-store can be hosted inside the already launched enterprise website.
Front-end and back-end administrations are possible through reputed ecommerce platforms.