Setting up your internet marketing web site to do complete eCommerce is easier than it might seem. There are a variety of excellent services and facilities available to make the job easy for your. Let’s take a quick walkthrough the basic requirements.
First,your product or services need to be visible on your site. Generally this involves adding a catalog of products or services to your web site. In some cases, you might set this up on a commercial ecommerce site such as Yahoo! Small Business (www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com) or you may want to put it up on your own site. If you expect to be changing products frequently or introducing new ones regularly, make sure your site is easy to update.
The second component, a key one, of your internet marketing web site is the ability to accept orders. This means that visitors have to be able to select a product or service, put it in a electronic “shopping cart” and then, when they’re done shopping, take their merchandise to a virtual check-out counter to pay for it. Shopping cart functionality can be purchased for incorporating in your own site or you can utilize a 3rd party service to do so.
Third, you have to be able to accept payments. Nowadays it is especially easy to accept payments on your web site or via email. Services like PayPal (www.paypal.com) and many others will allow you to easily accept credit cards, bank transfers, and handle multiple currencies.
If you’re new at ecommerce it probably makes the best sense to first integrate your internet marketing web site with a complete service such as that offered by Yahoo! Small Business before you invest in a major web site development project. Their service, like those at many ecommerce hosting organizations will provide you with A-to-Z support for your entire ecommerce activity. Once you’ve ironed out all the wrinkles, you can look toward integrating their services with your own internet marketing web site.
