Chapters
- What is a Web
site?
- What is Web hosting?
- What is the procedure
for building a Web presence?
- Guide to E-Commerce
Web Hosting
- Which hosting
plan fits my needs?
What is a Web store?
A Web store is a special-purpose Web site designed to
display and sell products. Just like traditional brick-and-mortar
stores, Web stores can sell just a few products or thousands
of items, they can advertise their products, have sales,
and accept various forms of payment. Unlike brick-and-mortar
stores, however, Web stores can reach customers all over
the world, instead of being limited to one city or neighborhood.
The Storefront
From a customer's point of view, a Web store is special-purpose
Web site that offers products for sale. A Web store has
one or more pages that display and describe products,
and a shopping cart where customers can buy those products
by giving their name and address and, typically, providing
credit card information. Beyond that, the look and feel
of a Web store can vary quite a bit, depending on the
number and types of products being sold, and the taste
and skill of the person who designs the store!
The Back Office
Your view of the store as a merchant is quite different.
Although your store is made up of pages, and there are
products for sale on those pages, you don't have to edit
the store pages directly, and you don't even have to know
how to make a Web site or page. You access the store's
back office with your favorite browser, and add products
and pages to your store by clicking on buttons and filling
in fields.
Your Web store will notify you when you have new orders,
and it provides easy, secure access to order information.
Online Access E-Shop and Marketstore plans offer other advanced
features so that you can provide your customers with the
easiest and most efficient online store available.
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What is e-commerce Web hosting?
E-Commerce Web hosting adds an e-commerce application
to a Web hosting package, which is what allows you to
have a store on the Internet.
What is a Web Host?
To have a Web site or store on the Internet you first
need to have a Web server. Unfortunately, owning a Web
server can be very costly and requires technical expertise
that most businesses don't have. This is where Web hosts
come in. Web hosting companies provide the equipment and
other technical resources that you need without the headaches
that come when you have to do it yourself.
Think of a Web host as the landlord of building. A landlord
rents out storefronts to various businesses. Each business
decorates and runs their store differently, and doesn't
worry about the maintenance of the building. In a similar
way a Web host rents out space on a Web server - or entire
Web servers - to various businesses. Each business builds
its own Web store and never has to worry about the maintenance
of the Web server.
In other words, the Web host provides the place on the
Internet where your Web store lives. It's a lot cheaper
than buying your own server, and you don't have to hire
the technical staff to take care of it.
What is an e-commerce application?
An e-commerce application is software that makes it
easy for you to build and operate a Web store. Online
retail
giants such as Amazon.com spend lots of money and hire
large numbers of programmers to build and maintain their
site, but Online Accesse-commerce applications let you
do it from the comfort of your own home or office without
any
programming!
The e-commerce application is server software, which
means that it is installed and runs on the Online Access
server
- you don't have to install anything on your PC. You
access it with your Web browser, and you simply click
buttons and fill out forms to build your store. You
can
check orders and make changes to your store from any
computer that has a connection to the Internet. It's
easy to learn
and easy to use, so you can focus on running your store
instead of learning a program.
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What e-commerce applications does Online Access offer?
Online Access offers two market-leading e-commerce applications,
each available in three plans to meet the needs of any
size store. SpeedyCart and ShopSite both
provide easy-to-use store building tools and secure shopping
carts.
See the feature comparison chart (below) for a complete
list of features in each application and hosting plan.
Each of these plans is available with either SpeedyCart
or ShopSite:
- Cyberstore is $29.95 per month and includes Online Access's
Bronze hosting plan. Cyberstore allows you to sell up
to 15 products and is easily upgradeable to E-Shop
or Marketstore.
- E-Shop is $74.95 per month and includes Online Access's
Silver hosting plan. E-Shop with SpeedyCart lets you
sell up to 100 products, and E-Shop with ShopSite
does not have a fixed product limit. E-Shop has many
more store-building tools and features than Cyberstore.
- Marketstore is $124.95 per month and includes Online Access's
Gold hosting plan. Marketstore has not fixed product
limit, full tax and shipping options, sales reporting,
associate tracking and much more.
E-commerce Hosting
Comparison Chart.
Back to top.
How do I get started?
There are two primary tasks involved in building and
opening a Web store: planning and implementation.
Planning
Having a successful Web store involves much more than
just an "If you build it, they will come" mentality. You
aren't ready to get started until you've done a significant
amount of planning.
Decide What to Sell
The products that you offer for sale are - of course
- a critical factor in ensuring the success of your store.
Here are some questions that you should consider when
evaluating your product offerings:
Uniqueness - Are you offering unique items for
sale, meaning that they are either one-of-a-kind or are
not offered for sale anywhere else? Or are the products
in your store easy to find in other Web stores?
Competition - If your products are also available
from other Web stores, have you spent time browsing in
those stores? Have you compared their prices with what
you plan to charge? What is it about your store that will
draw customers away from competitors' stores?
Profit Margin - For products that you buy at wholesale,
is your markup enough to provide you with some profit?
For products that you make, will you earn a fair return
on the time that you invested? Most merchants aren't trying
to run their Web stores as non-profit organizations!
Organize Your Products
The ease with which customers can find the products that
they're looking for is a critical factor in sales. If
you are planning on selling more than one type of product,
you need to have planned out the organization of your
store prior to building it. You should categorize your
products in ways that your customers are likely to look
for them, and then plan to place them on pages that reflect
those categories.
Obviously, a store with thousands of products will require
a more advanced organization.
Even great advertising can't replace good organization
in helping your store to succeed.
A Picture is Worth...
Your store will be more useful and appealing to customers
if you include pictures of each product. You should also
consider having an appealing logo on the first page of
your store, and perhaps a smaller version of the logo
on all other pages.
Pictures must be in jpg or gif format. If you have the
ability to scan and edit images yourself, you can simply
create the images and store them for later. Otherwise,
hire a graphic designer to take photographs, or use photographs
that you supply, and use them to produce images in jpg
format. When you receive the images from the graphic artist,
store them on your computer. You'll be able to upload
them to your Web store when you're building your store.
Gather Product Information
Knowing what you're going to sell and having pictures
of those items is a large part of the preparation for
building your store, but you should also gather other
information about your products. Having product information
on hand will make building your store much faster and
less frustrating. Specifically, you should have:
- Product names.
- Product descriptions.
- Product pictures.
- Product prices.
- Product SKUs or other tracking numbers if you use
that information for inventory and shipping.
- Product shipping weight, if you intend to charge for
shipping by weight.
Planning Payment, Tax, and Shipping Policies
Once you've planned your products, you need to plan for
transaction processing and fulfillment. Specifically:
- What types of payment methods will you accept in your
store? If you're planning on accepting credit cards,
how will you process those payments? You can perform
offline credit card processing, such as with a POS machine,
or you can perform online credit card processing with
some e-commerce plans. Any method of credit card processing
requires that you have a merchant account and an account
with a transaction processing company. Your Online Access
sales representative can help you sign up for those
accounts.
- How much tax do you need to collect, and from whom?
If you are not already an experienced merchant, you
need to consult a tax expert who is familiar with tax
laws in your jurisdiction. Sales tax on Internet sales
is still debated and misunderstood, but generally you
need to collect tax from customers in states where your
store has nexus - which is defined as a physical presence
- even if it is just your office or warehouse. You may
also need to collect at a higher rate from customers
in your home city or county. You generally do not need
to collect sales tax from customers in states where
your store does not have nexus. These are just general
guidelines and may not apply to your situation-consult
a tax professional to make sure that your store complies
with the laws of your location.
- What shipping methods will you offer and how much
will you charge? E-Shop and Marketstore plans offer
real-time UPS shipping charges, and all plans offer
many other methods of calculating shipping charges,
such as shipping by weight, shipping by currency (price),
and charging a base rate plus an additional amount for
each product. You should register or contract with a
shipping service and find out what you need to know
in order to charge the correct amount for each product
and shipment.
Implementation
Once you've completed your planning, you're ready to
get started with the implementation. Study the plan comparison
chart (link) and find the plan that best meets the needs
of your store. Remember that you can start smaller and
then upgrade your plan when your business grows, but the
additional features in the E-Shop and Marketstore plans
can help your store to grow more quickly.
After you've picked a plan, call an Online Access sales representative
and sign up for that plan. Your account can be active
in just a few hours, and your sales representative can
help you apply for merchant accounts and credit card processing,
too. You can start building your store while you wait
for your application to be approved.
Once your account is set up, you'll receive an e-mail
message that has a link to the back office of your store.
Click on that link and log in with your username and password,
and then the store building wizard will walk you through
the steps of setting up your store.
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