Custom Online Stores - eCommerce
If your business sells products or services, you can
use the Internet to provide your customers with an additional way of doing
business with you.
There are several topics that are important to understand when considering
building an online eCommerce store:
1. Types of Online Stores Online stores can be used to do many different things. Some examples of
things you can do with an online store include:
- Selling Products.
- Providing Online Seminar Registration.
- Proviging Online Class Enrollment.
- Allowing Customers to Pay Bills Online.
2. Online Payment Processing We work with Cardservice International and AuthorizeNet
to provide online payment processing.
When we build and host an online store for you, the steps for establishing
online payment processing include:
- Select either Cardservice or AuthorizeNet as your Provider.
- Sign a Payment Processing Agreement with the Provider you choose.
- Select the credit cards you want to accept and provide your bank account information to the Provider.
- When your payment processing account is setup, Internovations can make your
eCommerce site send credit card transactions to your provider.
Your online payment processing account gives you the ability to do anything that you could with a
standard credit card terminal such as post authorizations, sales and credits.
Standard issue on all the eCommerce sites we build are web pages or emails that inform
a customer if their credit card is declined and web pages that allow them to
correct or provide alternate payment information in such instances.
3. Website Security and Encryption When collecting information about you customers, you
need to make sure that the information is protected from prying eyes. On the
Internet, this is accomplished by encrypting the information as it's sent
from a customer's browser to the web server.
Types of information that we recommend always be encrypted include:
- Login names and passwords of any sort.
- Credit card names, numbers and expiration dates.
- Names and Social Security Numbers.
- Mailing and Email Addresses.
To encrypt information on your website, we install a "digital certificate"
on your website. We use digital certificates issued by trusted companies such as VeriSign or Thwate.
Internovations can host any online store that we build. We typically use a 3-tiered server architecture for
our online stores. The servers we use include:
- Web Server - Provides web surfers with access to your online store.
- SQL Server - This database server stores information such as products, orders and customers.
- Application Server - This server processed credit cards and sends various emails to customers.
Regardless of where you host, we provide you with a CD-ROM containing your online store and database when we are
done building it.
An important aspect of any online store to consider is that of order processing.
Ask yourself these important questions:
- How do I want to receive orders internally?
- How will I update shipment dates and tracking numbers in my online store?
- How will I handle various shipping methods and costs?
- If I was to start receiving hundreds of orders each day, how would I handle them?
The answers to these questions determine how we will build your online store. The level of automation
that you determine you need also dramatically effects the cost of developing your online store.
|
