Prayagasoft - web designer India, Ecommerce developer india, Ecommerce design

An Ecommerce Tutorial

Introducing ecommerce: a brief tutorial to selling online.

What Is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce simply means selling over the Internet - goods, services, information, whatever. Such businesses began in 1995 and are expected by 2007 to generate sales in the USA of $ 105 billion. Yes, that's $105,000,000,000 in the USA alone.

How do you get your share of the action? Easy. You create a website that promotes your products, obtain an Internet address, hire space on a web-hosting company, upload your pages, add a payment system and then use various promotion services to get your site noticed.

Building the Website

You'll be familiar with websites - collections of HMTL pages grouped around some URL like http://www.companyname.com. Websites can be very ambitious, with stunning graphics, animation, sound, database search systems, customer recognition and a good many other facilities. But they don't need to be. Many successful ecommerce sites are half a dozen pages extolling the virtues of the product. More can be less, and 'wow' sites will only hinder customers getting to your products, and make promotion more difficult.

But your site still needs to look professional. How do you create something convincing? You can:

1. Hire a web design company. Thousands exist, conveniently collected into directories .

2. Build your own pages using HTML-editing software. Easy-to-use editors exist for all pockets, some of them shareware or even free .

3. Purchase an out-of-the-box shopping cart program that builds the whole site for you, including an online catalogue with payment facilities in place.

4. Rent space on a web-hosting company offering site build online. Much like the out-of-the-box solution, the hosting company gives you templates and wizards to create a distinctive and professional-looking site.

Finding an URL or Internet Domain

The URL (uniform resource locator) is your address or domain on the Internet. You'll want something that identifies your company and possibly your line of business. How do you get a domain?

You visit an online company offering domains for sale . As you're a commercial concern, you'll go for a dot-com, or possibly a dot-biz domain. You'll try possible names in the search box provided until you find a suitable one available.

Suppose your company is Acme Diving Equipment Ltd. You find that acme.com has been taken, and so has diving.com, both a long time ago. But acme-diving-equipment.com is still free, and you therefore take that domain for a few dollars a year. An online credit card facility accepts your order, and an email a few minutes later confirms the purchase. Just as soon as ownership is recorded by the relevant authorities, usually within a couple of days, the domain is yours to go on with to the next stage.

Hosting Your Site

You're halfway there. You have the site built, and a domain name to host it under. Now you have to upload the site to a web-hosting company that will display it on the Internet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Thousands of such web-hosting companies exist, and there are now web-hosting directories that enable you to select by cost, platform type, facilities, etc. - all of which are explained by on-site notes. You make your choice of hosting company, click through to their site, pay their hosting fee, and can then upload your site to that company's server. The hosting company will explain how. It's very simple, but you'll need a cheap or free piece of software called an ftp program. This you can obtain from any software supplier , and use it to maintain your site thereafter. Once uploaded, your site goes 'live'. You're on the Internet.

Of course if your site has been built by a web design company, then they'll upload it for you. And if you've built your site online, then all you need do is email the hosting company with your chosen domain name.