There are various quality portals that allow you to have products and services displayed on a single page web site for free. Many business to business portals provide with this kind of services. However, for real time transactions you will still need e-commerce web stores.

If you are not good at design or don’t want to spend a fortune on you web store, you should think about getting an e-commerce stores from web enablers like Yahoo, Bigstep, etc.

For a nominal monthly fee you can have facilities required to run a full fledged electronic storefront and build it yourselves from easy to use templates.

If you go for this type of services, compare and see who has most of features for lesser price. Some business to business portals along with your e-business web store will furnish you with necessary features to carry out over Internet many important parts of buy and sale processes.

Shopping carts The integral part of e-commerce sites, which allows you to accept product purchase orders for multiple products or services, is called a shopping cart.

The term "Shopping Cart"is taken from real life shopping terminology to help users understand actions available to them. Like in a supermarket a user can add products to shopping cart, remove products from cart or adjust quantity of products as per requirement before checking out and making payments.

While looking for shopping carts for your e-commerce store, you should consider following aspects of a powerful and functional shopping cart:

Access to shopping cart should be clearly visible. There should be several entry points to cart. Add, remove and adjust quantity of product features should be prominent on cart page. The item name should have a link to description of product. There should be a way of saving items for future purchases. Shipping and other costs should be clearly stated before check out process starts. Order forms should be simple and clear. All payment options should be explained clearly. Ordering process should be done through secure server. You know you are on a secure server when URL of your browser indicates "https:". The s at end of http stands for "secure". Merchant Account 90 percents of all online retail sales take place through credit card transactions. According to industry statistics, average credit card sale is $40 versus just $9 for average cash sale. To offer credit card payment option to your online clients, you need to set up a merchant account-a bank authorized account established by your company to receive proceeds of credit card purchases.

Even if you already accept credit cards for your offline transactions, that may not be enough. Although, you can take many precautions to reduce online credit card frauds, credit card companies still consider Internet transactions to be riskier than offline transactions. That’s why finding a right merchant account provider could be a little bit more complicated than you might think. Things could be even trickier if your business is located outside of United States.

There are many middleman merchant account providers on Internet. Do some comparison-shopping before you sign up with any of them as conditions that they offer vary significantly.

Although, it is definitely good to have a merchant account that does not mean you can’t sell products or services without having one! There are numerous other payment options available on Internet. Most popular of them are paypal, e-gold, e-bullion, etc.

If you would like to have an effective online business, remember that old values still count. Proper planning, uncompromising customer service, integrity, hard work and persistence eventually will make your business successful.

If you know broad keywords that you should target but don’t have any idea how to make it more specific, use this little tool from Overture to show you what queries people make relevant to this keyword. Click here for tool.

Place keywords in right locations

For search engines page title is most important part of page. Make sure that you use your targeted keyword over there. For previous example your title may look like: ‘Supplier of Quality Stonewashed Jeans Fabric’.

Use your keywords in different forms in Meta tags and Description. Use singular and plural variations of words. Since search engines also look at content of your page, try using keywords in your headlines and don’t forget to mention them in first paragraph of page.

But do not over do it! If search engines feel that you are over using a word to lift your ranking, they may consider it as spamming, and block your website from their listing.

Content is king

According to research, primary reason for people to be on Internet is information. People want information, quality information, lots of it and in most of cases for free! This is reason why search engine spiders are created to look for good, relevant textual contents. If you are looking for a top position on a specific search, your website must have quality relevant content.

If yours is a website that only sells product or services, you may ask, how can you possibly have enough content? Apart from detail description of products or services that you provide, you should also emphasize on benefits of products. If you have related to your products articles, whitepapers etc. you must post them on your site as well. It’s important to post quality information related to your products or services as this also position your website as a knowledgeable leader in your respective industry and create interest among your audience to revisit site.

Try renewing information on your site on a regular interval. This, as well, will increase repeat visits from people and search engine spiders.

Submission to search engines

Once you are ready to submit your site to search engines, all you have to do is to go to relevant search engine site, fill up form there and submit. You can do it manually for each search engine separately or you can use programs to do it automatically. If you miss a search engine, you don’t have to worry about it much, as search engine spiders or “Bots”, as they are also called, constantly look for new websites to index. However, it’s a good idea to submit to major search engines and directories regularly. You should also resubmit your website to search engines in order to expedite process of indexing after each significant change you made to site.