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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.
Nowshade Kabir, Ph.D., is the founder, primary developer and present CEO, of Rusbiz.com, a global business to business e-commerce portal with feature like storefronts, aggregated catalog, e-marketplace, trade leads, internal messaging system supply chain solutions, etc. With a doctorate in Information Technology, Dr. Kabir has worked an advisor to government projects and has over 12 years experience in International Trade.