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In
U.S. electronic commerce in the year 2000 sales across the
internet reached $20.3 TRILLION according to the Electronic
Payments Association in the April 26 TechWeb News Daily.
That amounts to 6.9 billion E-transactions, which is up
14% over the year before. Now if you calculate your site
would only produce 1% of that then retirement would not
be far behind.
Here
are some examples of the types of businesses that are using
E-Commerce.
- Existing
"Brick and Mortar" stores
- Entrepreneurs
with new products/services
- Auction
Sites
- On-Line
Stores
- Subscription
Services
- Companies
accepting bill payments
Utilities -- Power, Water, Trash, Pest Control
Property Management
E-Commerce
is growing -- rapidly. E-Commerce can increase your potential
market-share exponentially whether you are a small or a
large business.
There
are several facits to opening a successful eCommerce site:
Storefront
Design
Your
storefront is the "window" the shopper walks by.
How the shopper reacts depends upon how appealing the window
dressing is. It is imperitave that the shopper feel comfortable
and not intimidated by tricky navigation, slow loading graphics
and hard to understand purchasing processes.
The
staff at Threefold DataSolutions
understands marketing, having been schooled by the best
in corporate America. With marketing backgrounds in many
diverse industries, we can help you structure your storefront
to capture the attention of your shoppers.
Back
Shopping
Cart 
Now
that we have captured the attention of your shopper, the
purchase process must be as painless as is possible. This
is the shopping cart. Your shopper will choose the various
items for purchase, put them in the shopping cart and ring
them up for a sale.
We
have many "off-the-shelf" shopping carts to choose
from, or we can custom design one for your particular needs.
Back
Accepting
Orders
There
are three ways that purchases can be made online. The easiest
is for the customer to get your phone number, email or mailing
address. Then it becomes a person-to-person transaction
involving your time and availability. This may work well
for very high-end items or other specialized products. It
is hardly desirable for high volume products. Therefore
we will address two common ways to accept orders.
Email 
This
service doesn't require that you have a merchant account.
That is handled by the service.
Your
customer fills out the order form with the credit card
information and submits it. This is submitted to the service
who will validate the credit card and send an email confirmation
to the buyer and the seller. The service deposits the
money into your account.
Your
only notification is by email, and you must manually handle
the sale. Also it is more difficult to set this type account
up to handle multiple purchases (shopping cart) although
Threefold DataSolutions
can make that happen. Ask us how.
Online
This
is by far the most common. Your customer fills out the
credit card information and submits it. This information
is submitted to a service that validates the credit card,
wires the deposit to your account and then sends a validation
code back to your web database.
Based
upon acceptance of the order, the database adjusts the
inventory, the shopper is greeted with an order confirmation
web page (with a confirmation number), and a followup
email is sent to the shopper and the seller.
Back
Order
Tracking
This
is a function of tracking the order by the order number
given by the credit card validating service. This is stored
in your database, and identifies the order through all the
phase of the order/shipping process.
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