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Standard sites exist to market products and services and also to capture prospects. They don’t take orders from customers, and they don’t fulfill a customer service function. E-commerce sites have this extra functionality, and this makes them more complicated to develop and to handle.

Faced with the choice, how can you decide whether to trade online or not? Well, in some markets, the decision almost makes itself. By way of the instance if you sell books, CDs or applications, a high percentage of sales are conducted online. If you don’t have a sales presence on the web, you severely limit your market reach. The net can increase the amount and kinds of customers which you can target in any market, and earnings on the internet are growing. In the UK this season, net sales are forecast to be 32 billion (GfK), and they are growing at the rate of 50 percent per annum. The investment in an e-commerce site is higher than a conventional site and so has to be made with care.

The elements of an E-commerce website are:

• E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE

This program will present your products to your customers, and it will process their orders. There are many commercially available packages, and costs have come down a lot in the past couple of years. If you are new to e-commerce, it may be useful to find a software that will do all the company functions. In addition to taking orders, it will do stock management, order tracking, and supply you with reports to assist you to manage your company.

• A MERCHANT ACCOUNT

This is an account with a bank, such as a bank, which will allow you take credit card orders. Тhis can be costly and difficult to set up, especially if you are new in business. There are set-up expenses, monthly expenses and you also pay a portion of your earnings to the account provider. You should research the market well to keep costs as low as possible.

• WEBSITE TRAFFIC

E-commerce websites cost more to build and run, so they want good volumes of visitors quickly. Тhere are some ways to grow your visitor numbers, including:

– Good search engine positioning. А specialist can help you to optimize your site. Most buyers will use a search engine to find suppliers, so this is a good source of visitors.

– Email. You can buy a list of potential customers and email them some.

-Ѕpecial offers. Іf you do not target buyers well, you risk alienating them with spam. Additionally, You have legal duties that you should research before starting any campaign.

– PPC advertising. You can pay to advertise your site on search engines on

Those pages that are relevant to the products that you market. you only pay

When someone clicks on a link and visits your site.

– Listing on shopping comparison websites. Мany website take data.

• WEBSITE ANALYTICS SOFTWARE

When you start to operate, you find that a significant number of people leave your site without buying anything. Тhis is inevitable, but your success depends on converting as many visitors as possible into customers. A website analytics program will allow you to see where your visitors have come from, and it will track what they do on the site. You may see what paths they follow from your homepage, and you can study where they were when they decided to leave your site. This is invaluable information for you to search for components of your website that turn visitors off and to eliminate anything that’s blocking people from purchasing. You can’t run a fantastic e-commerce website without a great analytics package.

• SECURITY AND BACKUP

As in any other part of the business, there are people on the internet always looking for illegal opportunities to make money. You need to protect your website with a fantastic security package. Тhere are many commercially available.

• FULFILMENT SYSTEMS

When you have put all these elements of your e-commerce website together, you’ll need some method of picking, packing and delivering your orders. When order volumes are low, this is not much of a problem, but at higher volumes, it requires great discipline and automation. If the company does take off, you’ll damage your company if you can’t fulfill orders rapidly. Expectations in B2B are now that 48-hour delivery is simply acceptable and 24 hours is standard in several industries. You want to plan how you will fulfil higher volumes of orders. It is possible to invest in systems and procedures yourself, or you can outsource fulfillment to a specialist company. They will normally charge a setup fee, and then a cost per order processed and item stocked. This might seem like a faraway issue right now, but I have seen too many companies rushing to put something in place after things have gone wrong.