E-commerce Basics for Small Business

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For most small business owners, e-commerce means selling things on your website. The more secure environment and the more payment options a website offers, the more visitors will convert into customers. Small business owners have several options to offer e-commerce, so here is a summary.

External shopping cart

An external shopping cart takes a customer off your website to process their payment then seamlessly returns them. You don't handle payment processing, but must fulfill the order after receiving confirmation of the payment. This can be used to facilitate e-commerce for any product or service on a website, as you are responsible to fulfill the order. The external shopping cart only handles the payment transaction.

Internal shopping cart

The least expensive method per transaction, but the most expensive and complicated to set up, is to have your own shopping cart and credit card processing. This requires you to get a merchant account. Once you have this merchant gateway, you can purchase shopping cart software that allows website payments or integrate your gateway with other payment methods.

Paypal

Paypal is a great service that allows users to accept credit cards for payments for goods and services. The negative aspect is your customers almost have to join Paypal to use the service, and some people are reluctant to do that. For business, Paypal now has higher level payment solutions that act in the background, allowing credit card processing and payment via Paypal but without ever leaving your website, forcing buyers to join Paypal, or even showing the Paypal logo.

Outsourcing

For some products a good e-commerce solution is to completely outsource both the payment processing as well as the fulfillment. Cafepress.com is a great website that allows you to sell everything from T-shirts to software. After setting the price, uploading a image and providing a description, you place a link on your website for the product. A customer clicks, makes the purchase and is returned to your website. Cafepress, or a similar company, manufactures the product, ships the order, bills the credit card and then sends you your share. If you have books, films, music or related content to sell, Amazon offers several powerful e-commerce solutions like Amazon Advantage, which offers direct access to their selling channels for physical products. Amazon's CreateSpace platform offers a great solution for books, DVDs and CDs where they manufacture products as ordered, eliminating the need for expensive inventory.

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