So what is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce is short for Electronic Commerce and refers to business that is conducted over the internet. Essential elements of ecommerce include a user-friendly website capable of receiving orders, website promotion, storage of customer and product data, the ability to accept and process payments, product delivery (electronic or freight), customer support and more.

The Ecommerce website.

In order to increase the chance of getting a sale, ecommerce websites should be well designed, user-friendly and with lots of well presented textual information ready to be digested by potential customers. There needs to be a mechanism for customers to place orders on the website, and this is commonly done by implementing an electronic "shopping-cart". In order to ensure maximum customer reach, the website should be thoroughly tested on a range of different internet browsers. It goes without saying that development of new pages and modifications to existing pages should be first tested on a separate server (or at least in a protected directory) before going live.

Choosing an Ecommerce web host.

Ecommerce web hosting is normally more demanding than for other types of websites. Since time is money you'll need to choose a reliable host with guarantees of great server uptime, preferably with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that means you'll receive a refund if there are more than a few minutes of downtime in any one month. 24 hour support is also a must - the internet doesn't sleep! If something goes wrong (and it will sometime) you want to make sure that your website will be back online as quickly as possible. Don't just believe what you see on the hosting company's website, do some research and look for reviews by other people (especially the negative ones!)

Ensure that the hosting package supports a dynamic web page platform such as PHP, JSP or ASP. Most hosts will at least support PHP but JSP/servlet support tends to be more expensive due to the greater load put onto the servers. A database such as MySQL or Oracle will also be required to run a scalable ecommerce site.

It is useful if your host provides some of the other essential elements of ecommerce such as a shopping cart and payment processing capabilities.

Accepting Payments.

If you can't accept payments then you can't sell online. To accept credit card payments you'll need to register for a Merchant Account, or use a 3rd-party payment processer such as PayPal.

Privacy and Security.

It is definetly recommended to have a privacy policy in place on the ecommerce website and it should be easily found from the main page of the ecommerce website. Customers will be less willing to hand over their credit card number and other private details if no privacy policy is in place.

Security is paramount. Any private information that you collect from your customers should ideally not be stored on the same server as the web pages and should be encrypted. This private data must definetly not be directly accessible on the world wide web. Consider using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for all customer or purchase related sections of the website.