Your business may be small-but the Internet lets you think big. Whatever product or service your business offers, the Internet levels the playing field and lets you compete with bigger businesses, reaching customers around the world who can conveniently buy from your online storefront 24 hours a day.
In the competitive world of the Web, growing your business and increasing your profits online requires careful planning and important steps. For every successful e-commerce businesses, there are dozens that fail because they don't address basic risks and pitfalls along the way. So to take full advantage of the e-commerce opportunity, make sure you base your Web business on a solid foundation that covers every element of e-commerce:
- Establish your identity. The right domain name, or URL, can make the difference between a memorable e-commerce identity and getting lost in the online crowd.
- Find the right online home. For brick-and-mortar stores, location is everything. Your Web business needs the right home, too. Purchase and set up your own Web server, or find a home for your site with a reputable Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Web host.
- Build an attractive storefront. With the right tools, creating a Web site is easier than ever-but following some basic guidelines will help make your site easy and fun for customers to navigate. And that means more sales for you.
- Let customers know they can trust you. In the anonymous world of the Internet, customers will provide you with private information, like credit card or phone numbers, only if they're sure your site is legitimate and the information they send you is protected. Make sure your site is secure-and that your customers know it.
- Make it easy for customers to pay you. You can set up your site so customers can pay by keying in a credit card number. But how will you process that transaction? Make sure you not only offer customers a variety of convenient payment methods, but that you can process them all reliably.
- Let the world know about your site. A memorable domain name, a great looking design, and top-notch products and services can make your site successful only if customers know about it. Promote your site to drive traffic to it.
The first step toward e-commerce is selecting the name of your site. Your Web address (also called a URL or "domain name"), tells customers who you are and how to find you on the Internet. It is the core of your Internet identity-your online brand. And because no two parties can have the same Web address, your online identity is totally unique.
Remember that not only does your domain name act as your address on the Web, but it also communicates and reinforces the name of your business to every Web site visitor. It can also be used as part of your e-mail address to reinforce your online identity.
Keep these tips in mind before you choose your domain name:
- Make it memorable. "Amazon.com" is more unique and less limiting than "booksonline.com."
- Describe your business. Avoid confusion by simply and logically describing your business. "Flowers.com" obviously leads one to believe they can buy flowers on the site. If you are setting up an online presence for an established business, keep the name of your site the same as the name of your business
- Keep it short. The best domain names are those that customers can remember and type into their browsers after seeing or hearing them only once, so complicated strings of words like "onlinecdstore.com" don't work as well as a simple phrase: "cdnow.com."
With a domain name in place, you're ready to start building your e-commerce storefront. But before you begin, take some time to plan.
Plan Your Site Carefully
First, identify clear marketing goals for your site, such as generating leads, building a database of potential customers' names and e-mail addresses, or putting a product catalog online to save the time and expense of printing and mailing. Quantify your objectives- such as increasing sales by 15 percent-so you know whether or not your Then, figure out what your potential customers need to know before buying your products and services. This might include:
- An overview of your company, its products and services, and their applications
- Complete product or service descriptions, including features, key benefits, pricing, product specifications, and other information, for each product or service
- Testimonials, or success stories so customers can see how similar individuals or organizations have worked with you
- An FAQ section that anticipates and answers customers' common issues
Plan the structure of your site, focusing on making it easy for customers to learn what they need to know, make a purchase decision, and then buy quickly. Create a site map that outlines every page on your site starting with the home page and mapping how customers get from one page to the next. Use tools that quantitatively measure site activity-where customers are clicking, how often, and whether they end up purchasing-then compare the results with your goals.
E-Commerce Site Design Tips
Following these basic guidelines will help make your site not only attractive, but also easy for customers to use-and that means easy to buy from you.
1. Carefully research your own favorite e-commerce sites. Creatively adapt the most compelling marketing and design techniques to enhance your site's effectiveness.
2. Your home page is your site's-and your business's-online front door. It's essential that it make a good first impression on visitors. Make sure it clearly presents the following basic elements that customers are always likely to look for:
- Your company name, logo, and tagline prominently displayed. Take full advantage of the opportunity to showcase your brand identity.
- Contact information. Don't make it difficult for visitors to find your phone number, e-mail address, mailing address, and fax number.
- A link to an "About the Company" page for customers to quickly learn who you are and what your business offers.
- A site menu listing the basic subsections of your site. Keep this menu in the same place on every page throughout your site to make it easy to navigate.
- A "What's New" section for news, announcements, and product promotions. Frequently updating this area will encourage customers to return often.
- Your privacy statement, clearly describing your business's policy for protecting customer's personal information.
3. Make it easy for customers to navigate your site. As you build your site, try to minimize the number of clicks it takes the customer to go from your home page to actually being able to make a purchase. Four to six clicks is a useful rule of thumb. Make sure links make sense, so customers know what to click to find what they're looking for. Don't make your navigation buttons or links too dominant an element in your site design: instead, focus on product information.
4. Keep things simple. Don't fill up your site with graphics, animations, and other visual bells and whistles. Stick to the same basic color palette and fonts your company uses in other communications, like your logo, brochures, and signage. Ensure that images and graphics serve to enhance, not distract from, your marketing goals. Make sure the text is easy to read-black letters on a white ground may not be terribly original, but they are easier on the eyes than orange type on a purple background.
5. Keep download times short. Test pages to make sure they're not too heavy with graphics that will slow load times-and minimize the size of your images when possible. Most users click away to another site or log off if a page takes more than eight seconds to load, costing e-commerce businesses billions in lost potential revenue.
As soon as you've completed this step, you're ready to put your site on the Internet.
Your Web site is a series of files that reside on a special computer, called a Web server, connected to the Internet. For customers to visit your site, they must actually connect to that Web server via the Internet and view the files. Web servers and the Internet connections that link them to visitors must be fast and powerful enough to quickly respond to all the visitors' requests to view your site.
Many businesses prefer the complete control of purchasing, setting up, and managing their own Web server hardware and software. Other small- and medium-sized businesses prefer to turn to an ISP or Web hosting company, instead of investing in the hardware, software, and infrastructure necessary to get online. For a monthly fee, ISPs and Web hosting companies will connect your site to the Internet at high speed via one of their Web servers, allowing the site to be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser. The host provides your site with space on a server, and also offers Web server software, access to its high-speed Internet connection, tools for managing and maintaining your site, customer support, e-commerce features, and more. There are many ISP and Web hosting options to choose from, so use the following list to find one that meets your needs.
With your Internet identity established and your site built, it's time to turn your online storefront into a thriving e-commerce business. To do that, you must win your customers' trust. Eighty-five percent of Web users surveyed reported that a lack of security made them uncomfortable sending credit card numbers over the Internet. Merchants who can prove the security of their Web site and win the confidence of these customers will gain their business and loyalty-and an enormous opportunity for grabbing market share and expanding sales.
The Risks of E-Commerce
In traditional retail business, consumers accept the risks of using credit cards in "brick and mortar" stores because they can see and touch the merchandise and make judgments about the store. On the Internet, without those physical cues, it is more difficult for customers to assess the safety of your business. Also, serious security threats have emerged:
Spoofing- The low cost of Web site creation and the ease of copying existing pages makes it all too easy to create illegitimate sites that appear to be operated by established organizations. In fact, con artists have illegally obtained credit card numbers by setting up professional-looking Web sites that mimic legitimate businesses.
Unauthorized disclosure- When transaction information is transmitted "in the clear," without proper security and encryption, hackers can intercept the transmissions to obtain customers' sensitive information-like personal information and/or credit card numbers.
Unauthorized action- A competitor or disgruntled customer can alter a Web site so that it malfunctions or refuses service to potential clients.
Data alteration- The content of a transaction can be not only intercepted, but also altered en route, either maliciously or accidentally. User names, credit card numbers, and dollar amounts sent without proper security and encryption are all vulnerable to such alteration.
The Trust Solution: Authenticated SSL Certificates
In the age of e-business, authenticated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) digital certificates provide crucial online identity and security to help establish trust between parties involved in online transactions over digital networks. Customers must be assured that the Web site they are communicating with is genuine and that the information they send via Web browsers stays private and confidential.
There are three key elements to inspiring the confidence of your customers and ensuring a truly secure online transaction:
Encryption - businesses that are serious about e-commerce must implement a complete e-commerce trust infrastructure based on encryption technology. Encryption, the process of transforming information to make it unintelligible to all but the intended recipient, forms the basis of data integrity and privacy necessary for e-commerce.
Authentication - although some Certificate Authorities (CAs, or the "signers" of digital certificates), believe that encryption is enough, it is imperative that your Web site is also authenticated. This will improve your visitor's trust in you and your site. Authentication means that a trusted authority can prove that you are who you say you are. To prove that your business is authentic, your Web site needs to be secured by the best-of-breed encryption technology and authentication practices.
Digital Certificates - a digital certificate is an electronic file the uniquely identifies individuals and Web sites on the Internet and enables secure, confidential communications. They serve as sort of a digital passport or credential. The practice of providing unauthenticated SSL certificates exposes online users to the risks of false online storefronts operating on the Internet.
With an SSL-secured site, your customers will have the confidence to purchase your goods and services. But enabling customers to pay you online takes more than just collecting their credit card numbers or other payment information. What will you do with customer payment information once it's sent to you? How can you verify that customer's credit card information is valid? How will you go about processing and managing those payments with a complex network of financial institutions?
You could simply set up a credit card terminal and process orders manually. But why invest the time and effort to build an e-commerce site without taking advantage of the efficiency of online payment processing? To offer a complete e-commerce experience, you need to implement an "Internet payment gateway" that provides Internet connectivity between buyers, sellers, and the financial networks that move money between them.
The Internet Payment Processing System
Before you implement a payment gateway, you need to understand how the Internet payment processing system works. Participants in a typical online payment transaction include the:
Acquiring Bank: In the online payment processing world, an Acquiring Bank provides Internet Merchant Accounts. A merchant must open an Internet Merchant Account with an Acquiring Bank to enable online credit card authorization and payment processing. Examples of Acquiring Banks include Merchant eSolutions and most major banks.
Credit Card Association: A financial institution that provides credit card services that are branded and distributed by Customer Issuing Banks. Examples include Visa® and MasterCard®.
Customer Issuing Bank: A financial institution, such as a bank, that provides your customer with a payment instrument. The issuer is responsible for the cardholder's debt payment.
Internet Merchant Account: A special account with an Acquiring Bank that allows the merchant to accept credit cards over the Internet. The merchant typically pays a processing fee for each transaction processed, also known as the discount rate. A merchant applies for an Internet Merchant Account in a process similar to applying for a commercial loan. The fees charged by the Acquiring Bank will vary.
Payment Gateway: A service that provides connectivity among merchants, customers, and financial networks to process authorizations and payments. The service is usually operated by a third-party provider such as VeriSign.
Processor: A large data center that processes credit card transactions and settles funds to merchants. The processor is connected to a merchant's site on behalf of an Acquiring Bank via a Payment Gateway.
Payment Authorization and Settlement
Payment processing can be divided into to major phases or steps: authorization and settlement. During the authorization phase, verification is made that the credit card is active and the customer has sufficient credit available to make the purchase. The steps in the authorization process are:
- Customer decides to make a purchase on the Merchant's Web site, proceeds to check-out and inputs credit card information.
- The Merchant's Web site receives customer information and sends transaction information to the Payment Gateway.
- The Payment Gateway routes information to the Processor.
- The Processor sends information to the Issuing Bank of the Customer's credit card.
- The Issuing Bank sends transaction result (authorization or decline) to the Processor.
- The Processor routes transaction result to the Payment Gateway.
- The Payment Gateway passes result information to the Merchant.
- The Merchant accepts or rejects transaction and ships goods if necessary. Because this is a "Card Not Present" transaction, the Merchant should take additional precautions to ensure that the card has not been stolen and that the customer is the actual owner of the card.
The second phase is the settlement process during which money is transferred from the customer's account to the merchant's account. During this process the following takes place:
- Merchant requests the Payment Gateway to settle a transaction
- The Payment Gateway sends all transactions to be settled to the Processor.
- The Processor sends settlement payment details to Customer's credit card Issuing Bank; at the same time the Processor sends payment details to Merchant's Acquiring Bank.
- The Issuing Bank includes the Merchant's charge on the Customer's credit card statement while the Acquiring Bank credit's the Merchant's account
Set Up Your Internet Merchant Account
After you've selected and set up your payment processing solution, all you need to start accepting online payments is an Internet merchant account with a financial institution that enables you to accept credit cards or purchase cards for payments over the Internet.
Now that you've established a compelling, secure, and easy-to-use Web storefront for your products and services. It's time to let people know about it. Here are a few tips for driving traffic to your site.
Register your site with search engines. Over 90 percent of Internet users search one or more of the top engines to find what they need. Make sure your business is part of the results when customers look for the products and services you offer. Manually submitting your site to search engines and directories can take countless hours every month.
Put your domain name everywhere. Brochures, advertisements, business cards, and even hats, jackets, and t-shirts can be effective ways to promote your site and establish your corporate identity. Don't forget to include your domain name in press releases, too.
Advertise. Placing a banner ad on other well-trafficked sites can attract huge numbers of prospective customers-and doesn't have to cost a fortune.
Purchase keywords. Another way to promote your products and services is to purchase keyword listings on sites like Overture and Find What. With these pay-for-performance services you bid on keywords relevant to your business and pay for each click on your listing.
Now, Start Selling
With an online identity, a Web host, an eye-catching, professional-looking Web storefront, rock-solid security, easy-to-use payment management, and the right promotions, your e-commerce business is ready to succeed in the competitive world.
