Ecommerce solutions for small business owners
By Uthkusa Gamanayake
You
are running a small business.
Or
You
may have a web site but has not been generating a good income.
Or
You
may have a web site, which is generating a good income, but you want to increase
your income.
Or
You
do not have a web site, but thinking of launching one.
If
you fit in to any of above categories then this article is for you. The purpose
of this article is to educate small business owners of how to launch and operate
a successful e-business. Many technical jargons that you don't want to know
but YOU MUST KNOW are explained in layman's words in this article.
Remember,
web sites are not to stand still and collect E-dust. They should generate good
income.
If
you believe that having an attractive and a colourful web site is e-commerce or
ebusiness, then I am afraid you are wrong. A good e-business solution should
include the following.
Identify
who are your visitors.
Identify
and present clearly the benefits those visitors of your web site are going
to get.
Visitors
should achieve the purpose of visiting your web site fast (easy navigation).
It can vary from find some information to purchasing goods or services. The
rule of thumb is that a visitor should fulfil the purpose of visiting your
site in maximum three clicks.
Information
should be clean and easy to read.
Web
site should be fast and should not take long time to load pages.
Web
site should get a good Search Engine ranking. Also should get lot of
visitors who are interested on your products or services (targeted traffic).
Now
you have two options.
Option
1: Develop an e-business solution by yourself.
Option
2: Get a third-party to develop an e-commerce solution for you.
Irrespective
of which option you are going to select, you should know few important
steps/terms used in the process.
1.
E-commerce web site designing:
This
is the development part of your web site. You should concentrate on the content
of your web site, user friendliness, speed and the structure of your web site.
Also it is important to use keywords related to your business properly in order
to get high rankings on Search Engines.
Don't
worry about this now. I will show you how easy this is. Keep on reading.
2.
Domain name registration:
Domain
name is the name of your web site
Ex:
http://www.preventiveguru.com
Domain
name is unique for you and nobody is able to use your domain name when it is
registered for you (for the period that you purchased). This is done through a
web hosting company.
3.
E-commerce web hosting:
This
is where you store your web pages, so everybody can access your web site. This
is done through a web hosting company.
4.
Ecommerce Shopping Cart:
Similar
to actual shopping carts at Supermarkets, you can use a virtual shopping cart in
your web site. So Customers can purchase items online, put them in the cart and
pay for the whole lot. Ebusiness software is used to develop digital shopping
carts.
5.
Credit card processing:
You
need to talk to your bank and get a merchant account to process credit cards
online. Alternatively, there are companies who do credit card processing for
your web site. They charge a small processing fee for each transaction.
5.
Shipping:
If
you are going to sell hard goods, then shipping is one of the main tasks.
Shipping can be done by yourself or there are fulfilment companies who do
shipping for a nominal charge. You should sign an agreement with them and
configure your web site to notify them about shipping details automatically.
OK,
lets consider your options of developing profitable e-business solutions.
Option
1: Do it yourself.
I
hear your questions. But it is not a very difficult task. Because there are good
tools to automate most of above tasks. Thanks to these tools, business owners
don't have to depend on others to run a successful e-business.
Your
next step
1.
Download FREE e-books for an A to Z explanation on how to do this from below web
page.
http://www.preventiveguru.com/ecommerce-website-designers.html
2.
Study details about ecommerce automation tools described in the same web page.
Done?
Fantastic. You are ready to start your journey.
Option
2: Get a third-party to develop an e-commerce solution for you.
If
you decided to go for a third party then you should know what to ask from them
and what to look for. Most of ecommerce website developers concentrate on the
look and feel of web sites. That along will never make you money.
Below
are few important tips that you should discuss with your vendor.
Keywords:
What are the main words related to your business and how are they going to use
them efficiently?
Navigation:
Structure of the web site and how easy to navigate and find information.
Search
Engine Optimisation: How are they going to optimise your web site so that it
will get good rankings?
Web
hosting space: How much of space are they going to allocate for your web site.
Web
statistics: Will they provide online statistics about visitors of your web site.
Statistics
are very important to analyse the performances of each page in your web site.
Below statistics are vital.
How
many unique visitors per day.
How
many visits (page wise).
Listing
of entry pages.
Listing
of exit pages.
Source
of the visitor (search engine, web directory etc).
What
are the keywords that are been used to find your web site?
OK,
What's next?
Download
FREE e-books from
http://www.preventiveguru.com/ecommerce-website-designers.html
Read
them carefully and understand the process in detail.
Then
go and see your vendor.
About the Author The author is the Webmaster of www.preventiveguru.com who has over 12 years of experience in computer maintenance and eBusiness solutions. www.preventiveguru.com contains Free DIY information on Computer troubleshooting, maintenance and ebusiness solutions. A self-help guide for non technical PC users. Anybody can use this article for commercial or non-commercial purposes as long as the content of the article is not amended and keep a hyperlink to www.preventiveguru.com
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