E-commerce is an extremely popular way of doing business on-line. It involves putting photos and other information about your products or services on your Website and providing a means by which customers can place an order and/or pay on-line. Products can be tangible goods or intellectual goods (such as music that can be downloaded after the customer pays).
E-commerce sites can be simple or complex, depending on the nature of the product or service being sold. At the simplest level where a business or organization has only a few items to sell, simply displaying the information with a buy now button may be sufficient. When many products or services are being sold, a much more robust shopping cart system may be needed. Some can even provide additional capabilities, such as generating invoices and packing slips, keeping customers notified of product updates, allowing customers to write reviews, allowing site owners to update the products themselves through an admin system, and many other capabilities.
Although there are many third-party shopping carts available, NetSoft Design generally recommends an open source solution called Oscommerce. This can have the look and feel modified to match closely the rest of the site with some of the functionality modified to fit specific needs. This shopping cart works nicely for many of our clients. It provides a lot of functionality and flexibility for the price, including all of the features mentioned above. If your business has a need for one of these or a custom built shopping cart, please contact us and let us know your needs. We can assist your business or organization with those as well.
In addition to the shopping cart software itself, most e-commerce sites require a method of processing credit-card payments. The method you choose for this depends on a lot of different factors about your business or organization. These include the size, the volume of sales your site may generate, and the level of professionalism your site needs to convey to potential customers. NetSoft Design can help clients assess the advantages and disadvantages of these options. Methods of credit card processing include:
In some cases, such as when using a merchant account to process credit card payments, clients will also need a way to ensure that customer credit card numbers are secure. In order to do this, you may need to purchase a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate to encrypt credit card numbers. NetSoft Design can explain what is needed to obtain this SSL and have it installed on your hosting account by the hosting provider.
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