e-commerce for online shopping and trading.
In order for businesses to be competitive these days, it is necessary to offer some form of on-line ordering and purchasing. We can work with you to develop an on-line purchasing system specific to your company. Why trade online?
- your online store is visible and open 24 hours per day and 7 days per week
- you and your customers can benefit from reducing costs through saving on printed materials, order forms and costly sales procedures
- reducing the time taken from your customer ordering through your virtual store to the customer receiving the goods
- new marketing options become available to you, increasing the potential for cross-selling and targeting specific customer groups
- immediate access to your customers for specific marketing campaigns
The challenges faced
E-commerce opens up the market place, it allows your competitors to evaluate your services, products and pricing structures easily and allows your customers to compare prices and get the best deal available.
So what is e-commerce?
There are three main types of e-commerce:
Business to Business (B2B) - the development of partnerships and alliances of suppliers of services and products in order to meet customers needs Business to Consumer (B2C) - the selling of services and products over the Internet to people who will use them Consumer to Consumer (C2C) - here the business acts as a facilitator to enable consumers to trade with each other online such as an online auction
What about payment?
Security, reliability and confidentiality are vital when taking payments online. Having these components in place ensures:
- the confidentiality of transaction details
- prevention of the abuse of credit card details
- details of the transaction such as amounts spent and products purchased will be recorded accurately
Most types of e-commerce involve the use of credit cards, this eliminates the delays of other methods of payment such as sending a cheque in the post.
There are three steps to making a payment online:
1. The customer makes a purchase on the web site by completing an order form and submitting their credit card details. The details are then transferred, over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) which encrypts them.
2. The seller processes the funds using the details provided by the customer, when they have been checked.
3. The credit card company takes the funds from the customer's bank and deposits them into the seller's account, the seller is then notified that the funds are now in their bank account.
4. The goods or service will be made available to the buyer. You can build your own e-commerce website quickly and easily with ZyWeb - no design or technical skills are needed.
If you don't have the time or inclination to build your own website then choose the Timesaver option and let us build it for you.