• 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.

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….