Many market surveys are increasingly projecting the robust and effective effect of Online Business / Sales and the role of E-Commerce in initiating the same. The trend has been felled by the growing sophistication of Internet Technologies that are powerful enough to help facilitate a consistent and hassle-free flow of online business transactions.
A Website is increasingly been seen as the Online face of a business and a place where interested or potential customers can check into and find out all about your products/services and whether they suit their requirements or not. Market surveys tell that a whopping 90% of Internet viewers make a purchase online today.
For businesses that look to run their business online, E-Commerce Website is the answer. It represents your business online in the shape of an Online Store or an Online Business House, a place where you can run your own business and transact business operations with customers, from across the world. In other words, it opens up a business online and helps run it without any kind of physical infrastructure or opening of a physical store. With just a mere few clicks, customers can transact business dealings with your staff or yourself, if such a situation exists, and help earn money the online way either through online currency or online transfer to your business account.
An E-Commerce Website, such as the ones designed by premier Web Designing Company, Megatask Technologies helps to not only run a business online but also help boost conversion rates and allow customers to make instant purchases online at any time, without venturing out to visit your physical store.
What Exactly Is E-Commerce?
It is described as a business model run online over an electronic network (Internet) that enables a business of any kind or nature to conduct its business operations.
Such business conduct can be any one of the following:
- Online Shopping(Online Store / Shop / Showroom) that involves the purchase and sale of goods.
- Any entity that involves buying and selling of services like offering expertise and service for a particular requirement (E.g. – Company offering Consulting expertise)
- transmission of funds or data online.
- Auction conducted online – Online Auction.
- Internet Banking facilitating banking transactions between a Bank and customers or between Banks.
- Online Ticketing involving the sale of tickets of any kind online. For e.g. – online ticket sales of cinema tickets or rail/air booking tickets.
How Does An E-Commerce Website Work?
To explain the work process, let us take the example of a Shopper looking to buy a product or hire a service.
- Shopper logs into an E-Commerce Website that displays categories and products loaded in an E-Commerce database.
- Customer browses through the Site and finds a few products he likes to buy. So goes ahead, creates an account, and later adds product items onto the Shopping Cart. All of the purchase information is stored in a temporary database.
- Once done, the shopper later gets into Checkout mode (Should be in a secure mode), showcasing a ‘Lock’ symbol and using an SSL Certificate.
- During the Checkout process, the E-Commerce Websitewill make use of third-party Software in most cases, to call up Shipping rates.
- Shopper places an order following which the Shopper’s purchase and payment information will get into the Shopper’s Administrative Section. To view and see the same, Shopper will need to log in with the desired username and password. The Administration Section (Admin Section) can also be used to add new products, or update products and maintain your own Website.
- Next is the payment process – keying in of Credit Card Number and other relevant information onto a payment gateway which could either be PayPal OR Paytm.
- Order is now complete.
Note:
- Payment information should not get transferred OR loaded onto the Shop / Store’s database. Being sensitive information, they’re all stored with the payment processor.
- Credit amount does not get processed in many cases for security reasons, through a Website. Instead, they get processed through a payment gateway (Payment Gateway is a source that works with the Credit Card Companies to ensure that all credit-card transactions are processed securely and credit-card numbers do not get stored by businesses. To avail of the Payment Gateway, it’s essential that the Shopper or any buyer should have an Account that allows for the acceptance of Credit-card details.
- E-Commerce Website will be guarded with 128-bit encryption using an SSL certificate. This will make incidents of fraud impossible. When a transaction is processed through a Payment-Gateway, what happens is that the money gets transferred directly onto the businesses’ Bank Account. All through, the Shopper (or Viewer) will not know about the payment process and how it’s working behind nor will be directed away from the E-Commerce Website.
Payment Gateway software) presents the Shopper with – Payment Options; Accepts Identification details like Credit Card Numbers; Authenticates customers using a password, and CVV Code OR Multiple factors of authentication.
It’s important to mention that there are certain E-Commerce Websites, especially in the ‘Business-To-Business’ category that allows for credit payment for purchases made.
