The Five Steps of E-Commerce

You set up a retail business, you advertise in your local newspaper, you get customers coming into your store, and you receive payment at the cash register. Create an online store, and...how do you get customers? How do you receive payment? The concept is the same, but the steps are different.

Step 1: Create your website

If you don’t have web design skills, you can hire a qualified web designer to create a website for you, or you can use an online site builder. Think of it as hiring an architect and an interior decorator compared to setting up shop in an existing store.

Using a web designer

With the services of a web designer, you can have a unique website template and website customized to your specific needs. A web development team can also add features such as Flash headers or any programming needed for your site. If your company image is critical, a custom-designed site that conveys the right professional image is a must.

Using an online site builder

An online site builder is the budget way to go. With site builder programs such as Site Studio, your website can be online within minutes. A step-by-step menu allows you to choose a layout and colors, and then add a site description, a logo, and content. Your template may not be unique, but your content will.

Step 2: Set up an e-commerce store

Your customers will browse at your website, select some items, and then pay for them. When you set up an e-commerce shopping cart, you’re providing a way for your customers to bring their purchases to the cash register. The program you choose will allow you to enter your products in the database and allow shoppers to choose products when they click on “Add to cart” or something similar.

Two well-known shopping carts, osCommerce and Miva Merchant, both allow you to do these tasks:

Add, edit, and delete product categories and other information

Set tax rates and charge tax

Receive payment via numerous online and offline payment processing methods

Bill customers

And much more



osCommerce

osCommerce is an open source program. Store owners can set up their online stores using osCommerce with no costs involved. For small stores, it has all the features you need for an online store. Drawbacks of osCommerce are that customization is not easy, and online stores using osCommerce tend to look similar.

Miva Merchant

While Miva Merchant carries a price tag of $995, some web hosts offer Miva Merchant licenses with their hosting plans. If you choose Miva as your shopping cart, be sure to host your site with a host that provides Miva support. Its learning curve is steep, and it requires the support of people who know how to work with it.

With the price and the steep learning curve, you get more features, and you can customize the program more. Add-in modules can be bought that perform a number of tasks. In addition, a strong support community is available in the Miva user group forums.


Step 3: Get a merchant account and payment gateway

When customers arrive at the checkout counter, you need a way for their payments to be transferred from their credit card accounts to your bank account. The method you choose may depend on your sales volume.

For high-volume sales, an e-commerce merchant account plus a payment gateway will meet your needs. A merchant account provider authorizes the transfer of payments to your account, and a payment gateway transfers the information from your customers’ financial institutions to yours.

Most merchant accounts have setup fees, transaction fees, monthly fees, and statement fees. The transaction fees are less than what you’d pay using a third party credit card processor such as PayPal. With all the fees, however, the overall cost is typically lower only if your monthly sales volume is over about a thousand dollars.

For medium and low volume sales, PayQuake and PayPal are viable options.



PayQuake

PayQuake offers three merchant account types to choose from. Although they all require payment gateways, the two smaller plans have no monthly minimums. You can upgrade to a higher or lower plan if your needs change.



PayPal

PayPal has become a household name. Customers can send payment through PayPal via credit card or via money that they transfer into their PayPal account. While the fees per transaction are higher than with merchant accounts, there are no setup or monthly fees, and you don’t need a payment gateway. You pay only when you have financial transactions.

Fore more details about these options, see WebSite Source Hosting Solutions: E-Commerce.


Step 4: Create a secure payment environment

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate enables you to receive credit card information securely from your customers. When a payment page is using SSL data to encrypt data, a small image of a lock appears at the bottom right of the screen.

Some web hosts offer SSL certificates as part of their hosting packages. If your web host package doesn’t include SSL certificates, you can purchase one separately.

With PayPal, no SSL certificate is required.

Step 5: Generate traffic


Your products are on display in your newly designed store, your shopping cart is set up and ready to use, and you have everything in place to be able to receive payments securely. Now all you need are customers.

This is where marketing comes in.

Submit your site to search engines.

Advertise your site.

Keep your company name in front of your customers with a regular email newsletter.

Add more content to your website to keep it fresh.

Monitor your website traffic to see where it’s coming from and how you can increase traffic for key content areas.



For related information, see these pages:



Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Promote Your Domain


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WEBSITE DESIGN

With more and more people turning towards online services, web design and development is fast emerging as a modern day marketing tool. Websites act as a virtual supermarket with no physical and geographical limits; and to tap this vast-potential business opportunity, a well designed and developed website is a prerequisite.
What is the process or approach to “web design”?
This is a question that many clients have in mind when looking for a potential web design and development company. This document explains the process from inception to completion and gives you an idea of what you could expect when working with a web design and development company.
This following is just an indicative guideline, as every project is unique and it may be designed and developed in different ways as per requirements.
WEB DESIGN PROCESS
Web design forms the base for development of a quality website. More than the coding and programming involved in the development stage it is the web design that attracts the visitors and induces them to browse through a site by providing user friendly screens. Hence, to make the website look attractive and readable, we need to follow a step-by-step approach laying importance on the following factors:
LAYOUT
As a first step website designers must discuss the layout and other requirements with the clients through a well-thought out process involving active consultation, participation and involvement of all stakeholders.
Through this, web designers prepare a comprehensive layout of the web design incorporating all the essential features/services of the company for review and suggestion. These suggestions are then included in the web design creating a strong base for website designing and development.
IMAGES & ANIMATIONS
Images and animations are an important factor in retaining the readers in the internet. They make the web page attractive and interesting to read.
We must use the latest technologies and standards in capturing and processing images. Use of cascading style sheet and flash images increases the aesthetic value of a site. We must also ensure that the images and animations are in tune with the content of the website and also ensure incorporating ALT Tag to make the images search engine friendly.
TEXT AND COLORS
Web designers’ should concentrate on the selection of text and colors in the website as certain fonts and colors will not be reader friendly. We must also make sure that the text and colors have relevance to the clients’ needs or client’s logo and are consistent through out the website. Fonts and colors must be reader-friendly and pleasing to the visitors.
NAVIGATION
Designing websites with effective navigation systems makes websites reader-friendly. Navigations are links that enables readers to identify the required information with in a website or through a guide/external website as per specifications of clients. An effective navigation design makes a reader jump to related topics and enables to browse through the web content easily.Through this approach we can provide quality and effective design that would be interesting to the readers.

Outsourcing web design and development company

MPR Group Solutions is an IT company. We have well trained and experienced staff. We have Web Design, Graphic Design, Multimedia Services, Flash Web Design and SEO. The working environment is very good.
Our company is a full service web design company providing all services such as website optimization, search engine optimization and promotion.
Our motto is “If you think big, then you can achieve the goal”.

Layout and Web Design
All the web pages should have navigation aid so that it will be convenient for the user to move to the next page. The web pages should have graphics with less color.

Original Content
Each web page should be unique. By doing this, the user feels like navigating towards the next web page. Any overlap of the content may lose the interest of the user.
There are so many ways you can make the web site attractive. Web design services include the following:

• Static web design


• Dynamic web design


• Web site re-design

Static Web Design
A static web site is the simplest way to showcase your business online. It is the easiest type of web site to set up, but making changes to static web sites require web programming knowledge.

Dynamic web design
If you require regular or constant updates to your website, consider dynamic website services.

Web site re-desgn
As the Internet grows, outdated methodologies are causing more and more web sites to fall to the side। It is important that you keep the look of your web site fresh and maintain cutting-edge standards of design, navigation, and functionality। You should regularly schedule a complete redesign of your web site, periodically giving your visitors a new and exciting experience. This service will ensure:

• Increases your user's usability


• Professional execution of the web site


• Enhance the perception of your organization.
  

While designing a custom web site for our clients, we ensure the following:

• Information architecture: structural design of shared information environments.


• Accessibility
  

Flash web design is useful and helpful in creating innovative design of the web site. This web site also creates animation with sound effects, thereby leaving long-lasting impact on the users. Flash web pages are full of graphics and multimedia content.
You can do flash animations and corporate flash presentations so that the user will be attracted to the web site . You can utilize flash in your web site in forms of:-

• Flash Introductory page


• Animated Logo design


• Photo galleries


• Animation with background music


• Flash Buttons


• Flash Menus
  
  In flash animation, combination of different fonts and effects and an unlimited number of text lines is possible.
  Our approach to web application begins with creating systems that meet functional requirement and serve large organization goal. We enhance the work quality and efficiency of the users.
  

Our application development services include:

• Strategy and planning - A complete needs analysis

• User interface design - Application design, layout, and navigational controls

• Software Development engineering - Full functional and technical documentation

• Production and deployment -quality assurance
Some of the types of applications we have developed:
• Web and Software application database design and development

• System upgrades and migration

• Customer service systems

• Feedback and communications systems

• Online ordering, e-commerce Solutions systems, and online payment options
Outsourcing is the practice of giving the project work to professionals. It is a term used when a company takes a part of its business and gives that part to another company.

Need of outsourcing

The reason of outsourcing is:

• To reduce capital expenditure over a business process.

• The management gets more time to concentrate over core competencies.

• We need not depend up on internal resources.

• Increases the flexibility to meet the changing business and commercial conditions .

Types of outsourcing
Offshore outsourcing: When a company on another continent is involved is offshore outsourcing.
Near shore: This refers to outsourced projects outside the country, but on the same continent.
Eg: US based company outsourcing to a company in Canada .

Why should we outsource?
Outsourcing depends on various factors:
If we take an example of IT, there could be one of the circumstances favoring an outsourcing solution:-

• Less of senior IT management

• IT strategy not consistent with business strategy

• IT budget is not predictable

• High inventory costs

Benefit of outsourcing
Outsourcing is useful in increasing product quality, lowering firm consumer cost.

• To focus on core competencies.

• Benefit the economy in terms of productivity.

Disadvantage of outsourcing
Outsourcing may result in the loss of flexibility in reacting to changing business conditions and cost savings.
If your company is outsourcing business process such as payroll, confidential information such as salary will be known to service provider. So we must be careful in choosing which process to outsource and which one not.