What is e-Commerce?
You've heard about it and you’ve most likely even done it. E-commerce is the ability to purchase a product or service (or even thousands of items) with secure shopping software from a Web site's electronic store on the Internet.
What is a Web store?
A Web store is a Web site designed to display and sell products. Just like traditional high street stores, Web stores can sell just a few specialized products or thousands of items, they can advertise their products, have sales, and accept various forms of payment. Unlike high street stores, however, Web stores can reach customers all over the world, instead of being limited to one city or neighborhood.
The Storefront
From a customer's point of view, a Web store is special-purpose Web site that offers products for sale. A Web store has one or more pages that display and describe products, and a shopping cart where customers can buy those products by giving their name and address and, typically, providing credit card information. Beyond that, the look and feel of a Web store can vary quite a bit, depending on the number and types of products being sold, and the taste and skill of the person who designs the store!
The Back Office
Your view of the store as a merchant is quite different. Although your store is made up of pages, and there are products for sale on those pages, you don't have to edit the store pages directly, and you don't even have to know how to make a Web site or page. You access the store's back office with your favorite browser, and add products and pages to your store by clicking on buttons and filling in fields. Your Web store will notify you when you have new orders, and it provides easy, secure access to order information.
What is e-commerce Web hosting?
E-Commerce Web hosting adds an e-commerce application to a Web hosting package, which is what allows you to have a store on the Internet.
What is a Web Host?
To have a Web site or store on the Internet you first need to have a Web server. Unfortunately, owning a Web server can be very costly and requires technical expertise that most businesses don't have. This is where Web hosts come in. Web hosting companies provide the equipment and other technical resources that you need without the headaches that come when you have to do it yourself.
Think of a Web host as the landlord of building. A landlord rents out storefronts to various businesses. Each business decorates and runs their store differently, and doesn't worry about the maintenance of the building. In a similar way a Web host rents out space on a Web server - or entire Web servers - to various businesses. Each business builds its own Web store and never has to worry about the maintenance of the Web server.
In other words, the Web host provides the place on the Internet where your Web store lives. It's a lot cheaper than buying your own server, and you don't have to hire the technical staff to take care of it.
What is an e-commerce application?
An e-commerce application is software that makes it easy for you to build and operate a Web store. Online retail giants such as Amazon.com spend lots of money and hire large numbers of programmers to build and maintain their site, but Green Light e-commerce applications let you do it from the comfort of your own home or office without any programming!
The e-commerce application is server software, which means that it is installed and runs on the Green Light server - you don't have to install anything on your PC. You access it with your Web browser, and you simply click buttons and fill out forms to build your store. You can check orders and make changes to your store from any computer that has a connection to the Internet. It's easy to learn and easy to use, so you can focus on running your store instead of learning a program.
What e-commerce applications does Green Light offer?
Green Light provides a bespoke e-commerce application to meet the needs of any size of store. Our application provides easy-to-use store building tools and secure shopping carts.
How do I get started?
There are two primary tasks involved in building and opening a Web store: planning and implementation.
Planning
Having a successful Web store involves much more than just an "If you build it, they will come" mentality. You aren't ready to get started until you've done a significant amount of planning.
Decide What to Sell
The products that you offer for sale are a critical factor in ensuring the success of your store. These are a few questions that you should consider when evaluating your product offerings:
- Uniqueness — Are you offering unique items for sale, are they either one-of-a-kind or are not offered for sale anywhere else? Or are the products in your store easy to find in other Web stores?
- Competition — If your products are also available from other Web stores, have you spent time browsing in those stores? Have you compared their prices with yours? What is it about your store that will draw customers away from competitors' stores?
- Profit Margin — For products that you buy at wholesale, is your markup enough to provide you with some profit? For products that you make, will you earn a fair return on the time that you invested? Most merchants aren't trying to run their Web stores as non-profit organizations!
Organize Your Products
The ease with which customers can find the products that they're looking for is a critical factor in sales. If you are planning on selling more than one type of product, you need to have planned out the organization of your store prior to building it. You should categorize your products in ways that your customers are likely to look for them, and then plan to place them on pages that reflect those categories.
Obviously, a store with thousands of products will require a more advanced organization.
Even great advertising can't replace good organization in helping your store succeed.
What is a Picture Worth?
Like any store, your aim is get people inside and your storefront will be more attractive and interesting to customers if you include pictures of each product. Consider placing an appealing logo on your storefront, and perhaps a smaller version of the logo on all other pages.
Pictures must be in jpg or gif format. If you have the ability to scan and edit images yourself, you can simply create the images and store them for later. Otherwise, hire a graphic designer and ensure they shoot and produce images in jpg format. When you receive the images, save them on your computer. You can upload them to your Web store when you're building your store.
Always Assemble Product Information
Knowing what you are going to sell and having pictures of those items is a large part of the preparation for building your store, but you should also gather other information about your products. Having product information on hand will make building your store much faster and less frustrating. Specifically, you should have:
- Product names
- Product descriptions
- Product pictures
- Product prices
- Product tracking numbers for inventory and shipping
- Product shipping weight, if you intend to charge for shipping by weight.
Planning Payment, Tax, and Shipping Policies
Once you've planned your products, you need to plan for transaction processing and fulfillment. Specifically:
- What types of payment methods will you accept in your store? If you're planning on accepting credit cards, how will you process those payments? You can perform offline credit card processing, such as with a POS machine, or you can perform online credit card processing with some e-commerce plans. Any method of credit card processing requires that you have a merchant account and an account with a transaction processing company.
- How much tax do you need to collect, and from whom? If you are not an experienced merchant, you need to consult a tax expert who is familiar with tax laws in your jurisdiction. Sales tax on Internet sales is still debated and misunderstood, but generally you need to collect tax from customers in areas, regions and states where your store has a physical presence (or nexus) - even if it is just your office or warehouse. You may also need to collect at a higher rate from customers in your home city or county. You generally do not need to collect sales tax from customers in states where your store does not have a physical presence. These are just general guidelines and may not apply to your situation, so we recommend that you consult a tax professional to make sure that your store complies with the laws of your location.
- What shipping methods will you offer and how much will you charge? There are several methods of calculating shipping charges, such as shipping by weight, shipping by currency (price), and charging a base rate plus an additional amount for each product. You should register or contract with a reputable shipping service and find out what you need to know in order to charge the correct amount for each product and shipment.