When Does One Need a Full E-Commerce Website?
If you have a serious business with large inventory and a large volume of sales, you will need a full e-commerce website.
An e-commerce website is one with a content management system, but includes more complex functionality than an information-oriented or portfolio website.
Features your e-commerce site may provide include:
- a shopping cart functionality with which users may make multiple purchases
- a secure payment using credit/debit cards or Paypal
- a shipping cost calculation facility
- product bundling features
- site-wide product search
- a shop by price feature
- customer login and customer profiling
- inventory tracking & stock availability reporting
- sales reporting and analysis
- k.p.i. analysis tools
An e-commerce solution may be custom-developed specifically for your business or you can lease a third-party module such as those created by MIVA, Nexternal, etc. Third-party payment systems such as Worldpay, NetBanx or Protx may also be integrated into your site. The advantages of using third-party modules are that they are robust and well-tested on many platforms and can be customized for seamless integration into your website design.
More modest though considerably less customizable e-commerce functionality is possible for a small volume of sales, even on static html websites, using options such as the Paypal shopping cart or Google Checkout.
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