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.
Our e-commerce solutions are designed with a native feature-set rich enough to address the needs of a wide variety of e-business operations. These include:
» Customer-specific pricing
» Account Management Tools
» Multi-level Tax Calculation
» International Currency Support
» Promotional Tools ( e-coupons; gift certificates; store wide, product discounts)
» Flexible Shipping Rate Calculation: ( UPS, USPS, CanadaPost, FreightQuote,
and FedEx servers)
» Flexible Payment Method and Processing options: (Credit or debit cards, electronic
checks, purchase orders, COD, or PayPal)
» Advanced Sales Reporting Tools : ( Various sales reporting tools designed to return
detailed information about different aspects of the ordering activity in a web store)
Our solutions are built on the fundamentally scalable technologies like SQL Server and ASP.NET. This is to limit the consumption of server resources and maximize processing speed, providing for painless expansion and evolution.
The content of the Catalog Pages and Product Pages which display the inventory of a web store can be designed to be fully dynamic, pulling the latest information from the store's database each time they are viewed. By thus eliminating the necessity for manual page updates, the maintenance tasks required for a web store can be greatly reduced.
The purpose of the following sections is to provide an overview of the steps involved in two of the most common processes that take place in an established e-commerce web store: the ordering process, where a customer compiles a list of items they wish to purchase and checks out; and the order fulfillment process, where the web store owner retrieves the customer's order using the Sales Reports and processes it.
Shopping and Ordering
The majority of a customer's time in a web store will be occupied by browsing the store's pages and selecting items to purchase. The primary component of the shopping process is the store's Product Pages . These are typically existing web pages that have been e-commerce-enabled through the addition of one or more Product Bots. In its simplest form, a Product Bot is an HTML form element consisting of a text input labeled "Quantity" and an Add to Cart button. Each Product Bot is associated with an item from the store's inventory. When a customer wishes to purchase the item represented by a Product Bot, they will enter the quantity they wish to purchase in the Quantity field, then click the Add to Cart button. The desired quantity will be appended to the customer's order. Any number of Product Bots can be placed on any page. A template-based Product Page can also be dynamically generated for any item in the store's inventory. To dynamically display multiple product items, template-based Catalog Pages can also be generated.
Customers can spend any amount of time browsing the store's pages -- Product Pages and otherwise -- and selecting products. When a customer is ready to check out, they will proceed to the store's shopping cart page.
Shopping cart marks the beginning of the checkout process. At this point, the customer will be shown the contents of their order, which can be modified to add or remove items. If the customer wishes to apply a coupon or gift certificate to their order, they can do so here. When the customer is ready to continue, they will click the Checkout button at the bottom of the page.
Following shopping cart, the customer will be sent to a login form . Returning customers will log in using the username and password established during previous orders. Once a customer has logged in, they will be able to use their saved account information, such as shipping and billing addresses, during the checkout process. New customers will create a new account by choosing a user name and password.
After signing in or creating a new account, the customer will be sent to page which will collect the shipping destination of the order. Orders can be broken into multiple components, each of which can be shipped to a different address.
The next step in the checkout process consists of a Shipping Summary page which will display the shipping information collected in the previous step for verification. If changes need to be made to the shipping information, the customer can choose to back up and make them. Otherwise, the customer will choose how the order will be paid for and will continue to the next step. We can configure the web store to support up to six different payment methods, including: e-check, credit or debit card, COD, purchase order, PayPal, or mail/fax.
Based on the payment method chosen by the customer on the Shipping Summary page, a set of forms will be loaded to collect the information needed to bill the customer's order. If the customer chose Credit Card, the form will collect card number, type, and expiration date; if the customer chose Purchase Order, the form will collect a purchase order number; and so forth.
After all the necessary payment information has been collected, the customer will be sent to a confirmation page. If the customer's payment information is valid, the order will be completed and a confirmation message will be displayed to the customer to indicate that the order was successfully received. This will conclude the checkout process.
Order Processing
Each time a customer completes an order in a web store, one or two emails will be sent to the web store owner to notify them that an order has been placed and requires processing.
Part of the information displayed about the customer's order will be Payment Status -- Paid or Pending -- and Shipment Status -- Shipped or Pending. The Payment Status and Shipment Status indicators can be changed by the store owner to reflect the order's fulfillment progress. Even after the order has been fulfilled and fully processed, it will be retained in the database indefinitely until deleted.
An important factor to consider when evaluating e-commerce solutions is the reliability of the development team and the technology used. We have been developing e-business applications for the internet since 1999 and are in the IT business now over 18 years.
It should also be noted that all our e-commerce solutions are built on a foundation of tested and proven technologies in Microsoft's ADO API and .NET platform. Stringent testing and conservative development standards are also employed to ensure that the code which composes the final deployment is reliable and efficient.
