Selling Products Online with Ecommerce

By Andrew Jacobs


Selling online with ecommerce is now considered the number 1 stream for any retail business and is a key part of site design. Year on year, sales increase and we are constantly hearing news reports of Xmas sales moving from the high street to online. Naturally, every business type and their net sales will alter as some products people just do not want to shop on the internet for. As an example clothing is still one element that the high street does get quite a large percentage compared to web sales. This is mainly because many people like to try clothes before making their purchase. This is changing though as distance selling laws help customers if they want to return products.

You have numerous options when selling on the web. You can go bespoke with a site developer purely for your needs or use an off the shelf package. The 3rd route is selling online via sites like ebay but with commission charges this isn't so viable any more. The option that would be most appropriate is really down to how unique your products and service is. If you are selling straightforward products and you don't visualize any further customisations being required, then off the shelf is a great option. Nonetheless as many products nowadays are beginning to use aspects like unique postage or technical features then a custom-made site is the best option. Choose a web design company which has the experience and has developed their own system or has modified a package to their consumer requirements. Bespoke isn't really expensive anymore (clearly depending on the customisations) and is a good solution.

Picking your payment provider is a major area of setting up any web business. Your payment gateway is the company that you send your customers to to make the payment for their online order. In Britain, Worldpay was one of the main players up till recently. Sage Pay (formally known as Protx) are now considered the number 1 choice for online transactions. Naturally there are the various banks such as HSBC or Barclays.

Sadly, ecommerce website design firms are now having to stop clients from utilizing online PDQ style payment systems due to new laws. This strategy meant the retailer could take the card number from the shopper (secured by an SSL certificate) and process it using their in-shop PDQ machine. This is now not permitted as diverse retailers need to conform to the PCI-DSS.PCI- DSS guarantees that firm take the correct precautions with sensitive information and due to the nature of e-pdq this is a difficult task.

Selling online with an internet site is a great way for any size of business from the tiny one man to a huge existing company. The time to act is now with more new shops than ever coming online.




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