The right choice of an e-commerce program

The right choice of an e-commerce program depends on the type of the product we need to sell.
If the product is physical which require packing and shipping the software that is needed is differed from a digital product selling( A digital product is sold over the internet.) The first item
of physical product required pictures,descriptions and choice of different sizes
the choice of webhosting services must be compatiable with e-commerce program.E-commerce
program that can be assimilated with a payment processor.
Various kinds of E-commerce program are there- open source or paid versions-better with small to medium online shops while paid version offer full technical support.
Search engine friendly- Many new e-commerce software program are search engine friendly.
that means that they create address and e-commerce website that search engine like google,
Yahoo and MSN can see what is in the online store. This increase the chance of being get listed in
the search engines.
Choice of Shopping cart- A shopping cart is an integral part of any e-commerce program since
it gather personal identification details and credit card numbers. There are various types
of shopping carts available. They range from merchant services to fully integrated shopping carts that require custom programming.
Merchant sevices-very suitable for small business. they provide their merchant acount,gateway,hosted shopping cart.
They require set up fee,transaction fee for every transaction. Merchant shopping carts have
an administrator interface which allow us to login into account ,add products,price and shipping options. The shopping cart generates the HTML from the purchase buttons. copy and paste
the html into the web pages. when a customer clicks the purchase buttons he is taken to another
website to enter credit card information.
Hosted shopping cart- It posses same features as merchant services shopping carts. It also
provides to login into to enter product information. They also generate html for purchse buttons
which can be copied and pasted. Hosted shopping cart allow us to customise the shopping cart
so that it looks like the page of your website. Customising the shopping cart requires some
programming languge knowledge.It allows us to use our own merchant account and gateway.
It requires fees for set up and transaction.
Fully intergrated shopping cart- The choice of an integrated shopping cart allow us to use our
merchant account, or a service that allow us to use their merchant account.
Free shopping cart require some programming skills to customise a free shopping cart. There
are more companies specilised in customised fully integrated shopping cart.
One main advatage with this type of shopping cart is that we can have customer reviews,sort
products,prices etc.