• E-business can be considered as an umbrella term and e-commerce is a small part of the broader term. In other words, e-commerce is just a subset of e-business.
• The term e-commerce usually refers to monetary transactions that mainly include the buying or selling or products or services. However, other business functions like marketing, customer education, customer support, getting raw materials etc come under the term of e-business as they all are business functions.
• If you are successfully selling something, that is considered as an e-commerce activity. However, brining customers to your website by efficiently marketing your product and maintaining the standard of your website is an e-business activity. Moreover, educating your customers about the website and about the products or services is also an e-business activity. To order to have a successful e-business, you need to get the appreciation of the customers and you need to use tools and techniques that can help you in bringing healthy amount of customers towards your website. Moreover, your website needs to have a better search engine rating which is an e-business activity.
• Let us look at a real-life example. We all know that Dell sell its computers, laptops, computer accessories, printer, monitors etc online. How it can relate to e-business? The first thing that happens is that the visitor visits the website of Dell and navigates it using the navigational tools. As the website is quite user friendly, the visitor doesn’t feel any difficult in finding the particular computer or laptop he/she is looking for. He/she finds all information related to that product. This information includes the pricing information as well as technical information about the product. The information should be precise, clear and should be able to clear most of the doubts of the visitor. Note that there hasn’t been any monetary transaction done yet, what all going so far comes under the term of e-business.
• The term e-commerce is often described as outward process as it involves processes like reaching the customers, any external partner, external suppliers etc. On the other hand, e-business covers various internal processes like content management, risk management, inventory management, production management, finance management and other internal business processes.

If you are willing to start your e-business, you must think about all business processes while outsourcing the e-commerce services using various web development companies or freelancers like those that are available in London. E-commerce can be considered as an online way of transaction while e-business can be described as the management of various business functions that enable successful transactions and growth of the business.

It is always better to have some knowledge about the basic building blocks of a website. However, it is not necessary to have the technical knowledge of the website. People who have the knowledge of web development can develop their e-commerce website without taking help from anyone. However, it is not advisable; especially if the developer is not an expert. Developing a website right from scratch is a time consuming task and is far more difficult then simply implementing and managing an e-commerce website.

Developing an e-commerce website demands more time as compared to time required to develop an ordinary website. This is because of various reasons; the major reason is that an e-commerce website is far more complex as compared to an ordinary website because an e-commerce website offers more features and functionalities as compared to ordinary websites. An example of an additional feature of an e-commerce website is shopping cart or the basket which is one of the most important features of any e-commerce website. Apart from that, an e-commerce website has to provide a secure payment system which is considered to be the most complex, time consuming and critical task in the development of an e-commerce website. Moreover, every e-commerce website calculate taxes and various other charges depending upon your location and after the customer checks out, the website has to manage the payment by connecting with a clearing house using a secure connection. If the payment is made successfully, the website then sends a confirmation message to the buyer’s e-mail address as well using the website’s e-mail system.

Because of these complexities, many entrepreneurs prefer to outsource their e-commerce websites despite of the fact that they themselves are capable of developing an e-commerce websites. One of the better options would be hire a freelancer, especially from London that can do the task for you as there are quite a lot capable freelancers available over there. If you have a decent capital and can afford investment over the e-commerce then you can also think about hiring various web development companies. Hiring these companies means that you will have timely deliveries of e-commerce tools and they also offer customer support as well.

Hiring web development companies is a slight expensive option as compared to hiring a freelance web developer; especially from London. Freelancers usually do the task at a better price. However, before selecting any freelancer, make sure that you check his/her relevant experience and sample of the work done in the past. Once you have selected the freelancer, deliver your user’s requirement with time frames and always make sure that you demand status reports through the development process.

The best part of an e-commerce website that the development and successful maintenance of an e-commerce website is significantly less than building a physical shop. Think of a physical shop in a specific area and the number of customers that can access that shop. On the other hand, think of a shop that is located online, with the help of an e-commerce website, and can be accessed by customers all over the globe. You can infer the number of customers you can lure in using an e-commerce website.

An e-commerce website allows you to carry out numerous experiments with the site by adding different features in order to capture the imagination of the customers. Today, e-commerce websites are made more user-friendly, easy to use and attractive. If build efficiently, an e-commerce website is capable of offering greater customer satisfaction.

An e-commerce shop can be considered as virtual shop that doesn’t physically exist but offers the same services as a physical shop offers with some exceptions like bargaining, physical inspection of the good etc. A typical e-commerce website offers a tool known as a virtual shopping cart, basket or a trolley just like you find shopping trolleys in stores. Every item selected by the customer is stored in the basket or the shopping cart and these items remain there till the customer checkout or put back the selected item. Some websites keeps record of all selected items and keep them saved so that they are available even if the customer logs off and return back after some back; just like you leave your filled trolley for a while and return back so that you don’t have to look for those selected items again and again.

A successful e-commerce website exhibits many features that are easy to use and practical. These features include selecting an item, putting it in the shopping cart, making payment and allowing the user to choose different payment and item delivery methods and finally checkout. All of these features need to be optimized and well maintained and designed. If any of the above mentioned feature is not available, unclear or not easy to use then the customer may wish to choose different e-commerce website with better design and features.

Below are just a few ways that you can encourage traffic to your website and encourage them to part with their hard-earned cash to buy from you:

1. Start with what you know. Make use of the existing offline promotion that you do. Make sure your website address is featured prominently on any brochures, advertising and business cards that you have. Everywhere that you promote your business, promote your website too, making the address clearly visible.
2. Do your search engine registration manually. If you know how to register your website with search engines you can do this yourself; if not, get a professional to do it for you. Don’t just rely on free, automatic registration services as that can leave you way down the rankings and pulling in very little traffic. You will get the vast majority of the traffic to your website through search engines, so it is worth your while to educate yourself about how they work.
3. Contribute to newsgroups and forums. Contributing to these places where people gather to talk on a particular subject will help to establish you as an expert. Look for speciality forums where the discussion will be relevant. Be responsible in your contributions, rather than simply just posting links for your website and you will be able to actively promote your business. You will probably pick up many useful tips through these newsgroups and forums and you should have fun doing it too.
4. Target your advertising. There many places you can advertise online – you can do this through banner ads, emailing your opt-in mailing, article directories etc. Think carefully about where and how you want to advertise in this way before you pay for any adverts. Try to advertise in places where the people who are likely to become your customers will gather, so you don’t waste money on advertising where people won’t be interested in what you want to sell. It isn’t true that if you send your ads to more people you will make more sales. You need to be strategic about who you target.
5. Measure your advertising success. This point is linked to the one above. Track what links are bringing you traffic and which of these are converting into sales. That way, you can concentrate your time and money on advertising in places that will bring you traffic and sales.
6. Do some link-building. One-way or reciprocal links are partly what boosts your search engine rankings. However, all links are not created equal. You need to make sure that the other websites that you link with are good quality, and that they deal with the same subject as your website. If you get the right link partners, you both benefit.
7. Get the offline press interested in your business. If your online business deals with something newsworthy or of particular interest to people, you may be able to get the print press, perhaps in your local area, to run a story on you. Make sure you get the link to your website in the press report and that will drive more traffic there.
8. Get a sensible website address. The URL of your website needs careful consideration. It needs to be distinctive and memorable, so people will remember it to type it into search engine. Your website should give a clear idea of the subject of your business to bring n targeted traffic and add to your conversions.
9. Use several URLs. You can point several one website. Register several website addresses, perhaps the same website name with different extensions, and you can use them to your advantage, emphasising several different aspects of your ecommerce business.
10. Give some added value. People love freebies. If you are offering something for nothing, it is a great way to drive traffic to your website. You can offer free reports, free products etc. You will be seen as an all-round good guy and you will give people a taster of what your business has to offer, enticing more people to buy from you.

if you know any other way?  please post in the comments area

Before you read this article you should have clear idea of the following things:

• What is the nature of your business (I assume its selling stuff)
• Who are your target customers
• Are they returning customers
• At what scale you are going to start
• What will be your future expansions

Those were some common questions you should know the answer or at least have some idea, Because i will be using these points in my tutorials to explain how each solution can help you meet your requirements.

1. Using Third party shopping cart by gateway service provider
2. Shopping cart hosted on third party website
3. Self hosted Shopping cart

Shopping Cart using third party website

These are the simple and less expensive solution of all of the shopping cart solution we going to talk here.

Introduction

In this solution you host the website with listening all the products using content management system or simple html pages and add to cart button next to each product or item.

When user clicks on the add to cart button it takes to the third party website and save in its shopping cart. There is no shopping cart script require to be installed.

Now you must be thinking how to add an add to cart button? well you don’t need to worry, because cart hosting website provide you complete simple steps to generate different buttons. you just copy & paste into your static html pages.

Examples:

• 1shoppingcart.com
• Paypal.com

Advantages:

1. Simple to setup
2. Cost effective in short term goals
3. Secure and Trusted service provider to gain customer satisfaction
4. Easy to manage from provider control panel

Disadvantages

1. Less control over the shopping cart and user interaction
2. Not a reliable solution for long term goals.
3. only suitable for small businesses
4. Gateway commission may be higher

these were few pros and crones of the solution i tried to explain above. will move to next solution and see how those work out.

to be continued….