| |
| |
|
Ecommerce Information |
|
|
|
Six Components Of A Good E-Commerce Site
Businesses, which are still sitting on sidelines and not doing business on the Internet, should think seriously about their position! If you are one of them, chances are there, that you have to pay dearly for your indecision as you might lose significant market share to your more proactive competitors in a very short period of time. Apart from the fact that e-commerce is growing at the rate of more than 25 percent a year, the use of online features can bring efficiency to virtually every aspect of business process, be it supply chain management or customer support management. But, how can you build an e-commerce business and take advantages of all these great possibilities? After all, you are pretty sure that anything to do with new technology is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. Believe it or not, this is just a misconception that most business owners have about the Internet technology. The truth is - in order to run a business online and reap profits, like any new effort, you need to do a little homework, have patience and determination, and get going. Take the following steps seriously and in no time you will be able to embrace fascinating world of online business. Take your products online Getting your product online does not simply mean - having a nice picture and a product narration to go with it. Effective use of the Internet is based on standards. Standards, as you know, are created to facilitate common use of a technology. If you ever imported or exported a product or service, or if you registered your product with some kind of authorities ever; you certainly know that each product falls under certain subcategory according to the classification system that you encountered. Internet is the same thing. Since the emergence of Internet, several classification systems have been developed. If you think long term and would like to use same catalog with multiple e-marketplaces, you should adopt one of the prevailing classification system in the Internet. The best online catalog classification available from my point of view is UNSPSC. For one thing, many prominent e-marketplaces adopted this particular system, which allows you to post your products on multiple e-procurement systems and e-marketplaces. How do you do this? I would suggest you to become a member of one of the e-marketplaces, where you can aggregate your products using some kind of simple wizards or forms. E-marketplaces based on Commerce One's the largest B2B e-marketplace enabler, have this facility. Our own Rusbiz e-catalog system, which is also based on UNSPSC, also allows you to integrate your products using a very simple but sophisticated form. If you do not have time to do it by your own, you can use the service of a B2B exchange. Rusbiz also provides with similar service. Get an online presence What should be your next step once you have all your products transformed into e-catalog? Naturally, you need to have an online presence to sell the products. There are number of options how to do this. Become a member of an e-marketplace This could be a large geography oriented fairly large horizontal market or a vertical e-marketplace specific to your industry. The membership fees are in most of the cases not so expensive. But many of them charge some percentage on your transactions, usually, from 1 to 3 percent. If you expect big sales volume, you may think this might not be the best choice for you. However, if you get new customers, thanks to your mere presence in an e-marketplace, the percentage that you have to pay on the transaction you should consider as customer acquiring cost. Under any circumstances, it is good to become a member of at least one e-marketplace as you -automatically get exposed to thousands of new prospective customers. Build a website There are several ways you can construct an e-commerce site to your need. You can build a website in house by employing developers or you can hire a web development company to do this for you. The advantage is you can have a website with the look, feel and functionality according to your given specification. However, both of these methods could be way costly for a small business. Average cost of building an e-commerce website runs starting from US$ 600 plus hosting and maintenance charges for a miniscule site with limited features to several hundred thousand US Dollars for a powerful e-commerce website. Another option that you have as a small business is to build an e-commerce site from prefabricated templates. While this is affordable and easy, you considerably lose flexibility and customization possibilities in comparison to building a site from scratch. Build a web store All these above mentioned cases do not allow you to have the potentials and advantages that come with an e-business website integrated with a B2B exchange. Which means, whether you are a business to consumer company with occasional sales to businesses or you are a pure play B2B company, a Web Store merged into an e-marketplace is what you need. A web store from a B2B exchange gives you the best of both worlds. You are having a professional e-commerce site which incorporates all the features that an e-marketplace has to offer. And you build a site from simple and easy to edit templates. For a detailed information about the features that come with a web store and benefits that you can get from them, follow this link: Powerful E-business Store About The Author Nowshade Kabir, Ph.D., is the founder, primary developer and present CEO, of Rusbiz.com, a global business to business e-commerce portal with feature like storefronts, aggregated catalog, e-marketplace, trade leads, internal messaging system supply chain solutions, etc. With a doctorate in Information Technology, Dr. Kabir has worked an advisor to government projects and has over 12 years experience in International Trade. An author of many B2B and business related articles; he publishes a bi-weekly E-zine for online business community. You can subscribe to his newsletter free of charge from http://www.rusbiz.com.
MORE RESOURCES:
Web Hosting Offered to Non-Profits, with Ecommerce Software - WebSite Host Directory (press release)
Ecommerce - Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Shopping Online: What You Should Know For some people, shopping online is as normal as driving a car. It's become part of the norm. Complementary-Relational Linking and How It Could Save Your Internet Business The concept of linking is that sites with common interests should link to drive more traffic to each other's businesses and to increase their "popularity." Search engines, such as Google, give much higher ranking to sites with high popularity. Evaluating Vendors of Ecommerce Fulfillment Services Once your website has secured an order, you have to fulfill it. While the fulfillment of digital goods is usually handled online, the delivery of physical goods is handled in a "brick-and-mortar" world. A Beginners Guide To Setting Up A Successful Online Store A beginner's guide to setting up a successful online store Online selling is by no means a simple task. To sell products online not only requires making use of high end marketing strategies but also involves lots of planning. Get Out of The Way Get out of the way and make it easy for your visitors to find what they want.Recently I completed a report for a site that was the most 'peaceful' and among the most 'useful' I had seen in a long time. Intranet Portals - Collaboration through Team Rooms Knowledge Management for beginnersKnowledge Management (KM) can be defined simply as the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Knowledge assets are often grouped into two categories:(1) Explicit Knowledge Generally, everything and anything that can be documented, archived and codified. Web Users Crave Familiarity The sad truth is, general Web users would love it if all our sites looked like Amazon.com. Web advertising e-Marketing Places! Overview:What is web advertising?Internet Advertising is popularly known as web advertising. Internet webadvertising giving Opportunity to the advertiser to target geographic country wise, subject wise, targeted Customers only from more than 200 countries worldwide. 10 Reasons Why People Wont Buy A Second Product From You 1. You didn't follow up after the first sale. One Point Two Billion In this surreal world of the internet, anyone, even you, can put your point across to a staggering number of people in every country on the planet.From political activists to artists and writers, can now find an audience to take notice of them where they could not get much attention in their local community. Online Payments Make It Easy For Your Customers To Buy In the last column we discussed the process of credit card enabling your brick-and-mortar business. I pointed out that research has shown that accepting credit cards can help increase revenue and speed up cash flow. Shopping from Your Cell Phone with Froogle Wireless Many surfers already know about Froogle, Google's shopping portal that is still in beta testing. Google has now expanded their Froogle service so that it is available on WML-enabled cellular phones. Database: The Secret of Success BENEFITS OF A DATABASEBy maintaining your list as a database, you can segment in many ways for targeting. Targeting improves the productivity of your offers. How Measuring Key Performance Indicators Can Improve E-Commerce Strategy - Part Two Why time spent on your site is importantAll websites regardless of type should measure this KPI, simply because all websites can use it as a gauge to see how compelling their offers are as well as check web site performance. It doesn't matter whether you're running a content portal or an e-commerce sales operation, time spent on your pages is an important metric to measure. Leading eCommerce Consultant Admits You Should Only Listen to One Real Expert! (And its not him!) Let me share with you a secret that most marketing experts and consultants don't want you to know? (many of them don't even understand this secret themselves.)The secret is? There is only one true expert who can show you how to drastically improve the effectiveness of your website and your marketing. Is ClickBanks Popularity Drawing To An End? ClickBank is the Internet's most popular payment processor for online payments but with many rivals appearing on the scene is ClickBank's popularity drawing to an end?ClickBank allows website owners to accept credit and debit card payments online and then deliver the products to their customers instantly. Since August 2005, ClickBank has integrated with PayPal so that people who either do not have a credit or debit card or choose not to use their cards online, can now pay using funds from their PayPal account instead. Online Business- What Makes It a Success! Only a few manage to sell everything under the sun over the internet. There are billions of web sites running online business, trying to outdo each other by various means. Web Store - Why Do You Need One? Internet has opened a new era of business opportunities. Each day, thousands of new consumers are joining the Internet. Increasing E-commerce Website Sales With consumers purchasing billions of dollars of merchandise online each and every year, the Internet has become the key to financial security. The e-commerce business has consistently thrived well above all other online enterprises, and continues to flourish. What is SSL (the little padlock)? SSL ("Secured Socket Layer") is a protocol used to encrypt the communication between the user's browser and the web server. When SSL is active, a "little padlock" appears on the user's browser, usually in the status line at the bottom (at the top for Mac/Safari users.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
