What is e.Commerce?
e.Commerce is selling goods using web pages and the internet, it is conducting business on-line. This includes, buying and selling products, digital cash such as Paypal, and via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Some of the components of e-commerce include:
Electronic presentation of goods and services (catalog)
On-line ordering and payment processing (SSL)
Automated customer account inquiries
Receipt generation and on-line bill/account presentation
A few ways to implement e-commerce include:
Develop an interactive database-driven online catalog
Add secure on-line ordering capabilities with electronic payment, real-time shipping quotes and electronic receipts
Web-enable invoices, receipts and statements for real-time presentation
Benefits of e-commerce include:
Increased order capacity with less human intervention
Incresed margins by improving the transaction cycle processes
Improved customer service by providing customers "What they want, when they want it"
Transaction Cycle
Merchant builds their site/store – A company would design and build a web site that includes for sale product and/or services. In addition, they would select a method of payment processing, and integrate these abilities into the site. Once the site is completed, the merchant is ready to receive orders from shoppers.
Visitors place orders – Shoppers can browse through products, adding them to a shopping cart as they go. When they’re finished shopping, they confirm the order, and provide personal contact information, including a shipping address.
Enter payment details – Once the purchaser enters their personal information, they’re prompted for the credit card number (or other accepted payment methods). Once the data has been entered, shoppers click on "Confirm Order".
Authorizes order – Once the customer places the order the system will seek approval of the credit card. The system would either submit the credit card details to a payment clearing house or directly to the banks network.
Approves or Denies – Once the bank’s system receives the transaction authorization back, it approves or denies the order based on the shopper’s available credit and status.
Returns information to store – The approval or denial is then sent back to the store, and provided to the shopper. If it was completed, a transaction or order number and receipt is displayed for printing. From start to finish this process usually takes less than 15 seconds. When the order is approved, the bank will debit the item on the shopper’s credit card, or the funds are transferred into the merchant's bank account.
Posting into accounting system - Once this cycle has completed, the results of the order confirmation get polled by RemoteDesk for data verification and preparation for posting into ACCPAC Plus, ACCPAC Windows or Adagio
RemoteDesk takes your remote source ordering needs one step further by offering an inexpensive way to integrate your website and shopping cart data to your back end accounting system.
How? Automatic polling and posting to ACCPAC Plus, ACCPAC Windows or Great Plains Dynamics using RemoteDesk e.Commerce as your data "traffic cop".
In the general setup steps in taking your company to the web, the number one issue overlooked is back-end integration to your accounting system. How are you going to get all these great orders from your website and into your accounting system?? Well look no further, because we have solved that ever-present question that will soon become your largest source of problems if not addressed.
How does RemoteDesk e.Commerce work?
RemoteDesk e.Commerce serves the same purpose as the Administrator only with the added functionality of web integration. It resides at the head office, and polls the website or e-mail system for orders, in addition to the ability to receive orders from salesrep laptops, branch office PC's or PocketPC devices
Promoting Your Site
There are many ways to promote your site, some are more successful than others. Below are listed the "Top 10 Ways to Promote Your Site", and how to maximize each of these options.
Your best bet is to pick which ones best suit the nature of your products or service and start there.
1. Submit your site to Search Engines.
After submitting your website information to the search engines, there are a few more things you can do to promote your site. They include the following:
2. Announce on your ISP's Member Site List
3. Post to Newsgroups
4. Press Releases
5. Submit to Award type websites
6. E-mail to databases
7. Anounce to Special Interest Groups
8. Tell Everyone
9. Add your web site to all regular business forms
10. Reciprocal Links
Submit your Site to Search EnginesSome of the most popular search engines are:
Yahoo
Excite
WebCrawler
Lycos
Infoseek
Alta Vista
Google
You can do this one search engine at a time, or use a service/product or company that will do a global search engine submit for you. The site we use is; Net Mechanic Lastly - read all about Web Site Promotion Techniques for Top Search Engine Listings
Another important place to submit your website is to Free Link Pages. These are growing in popularity and are available on many sites.
Announce on your ISP's Member Site ListMost Internet Service Providers (ISP) have an area where users can talk in a forum or a directory. Be sure to include yourself in this area.
Post to NewsgroupsPost an announcement on all relevant usenet newsgroups. If your website has regional information, post in the general newsgroup for your region. You should limit your postings only to newsgroups which are designated for commercial announcements. You are trying to build goodwill so post where appropriate, and when appropriate.
Press ReleasesPress releases are a great promotion tool. You can create, post it on your own site, and submit it to appropriate print, broadcast, and internet media. If your site is;General interest - your options include your local newspaper, and some of your local radio and television stations. Special Interest - your options include trade publications and broadcast media that focus on some niche area of interest.Before sending a Press release though make sure you have;
written it correctly, and it is newsworthy.
you have the correct contact for your area or you can simply submit it to a press release agency, and hope that somebody finds it interesting and does a follow-up with you or posts it.
Join local groupsIf you can get your website listed as Cool Site of the Day or be designated a Point Review Top 5% of the Net, you may have to start worrying about the bandwidth policy of your ISP. Some of this recognition has been known to load down a server, at least for a few days, if not for the long term. If you are not familiar with these web awards take a look at our page titled, Special Awards and Recognition. This type of special recognition not only will generate traffic to your website, but it also makes you feel really, really good. There's not a lot of high pay out there for building an excellent website, so its a great reward to get some well deserved recognition from your peers for your efforts. You can't receive these accolades unless the web reviewers learn about your site. They look at a lot of sites everyday to make their selections. In fact, these guys are so busy looking at sites, how do they find yours? They don't. You find them. The best way to get noticed, reviewed, and maybe even recognized with an award is to submit information to them just as you did to the search engines. In fact, you probably can even use the same text you used for those announcements. Not all web reviewers are created equal. A review or award from one reviewer may produce thunderous traffic, whereas another may not even produce a ripple on your site access stats. Except for a few of the biggies, you can't really tell what will produce the most visitors to your website. All I can say is submit your website to as many of the appropriate ones as you can. If you recognize some names, you should probably submit to them first. If you don't know where to start, here are a few websites that keep track of these reviewers and you can follow their links to the submission points.
E-mail to VIPsIf you read in the paper or hear on the news, that a congressman has given up on budget and welfare reform and has decided to coddle up to a special interest in congress, you should send him a fax, letter, and/or e-mail announcing the great resource that you have made available free to the web-walking public. They may be so impressed by your public spirit and the incredible content of your web page that he reads it into the Congressional Record. Imagine, your life will never ever again be the same.
Special Interest GroupsYou should notify all the other home pages dedicated to your topic that your website has arrived. They will probably want to link to your page. If your website is all about HTML programming, you should probably look for webmaster websites and user groups (SIGs). Generating links and word of mouth advertising will expand your reach and bring in more traffic.
Tell Everyone with whom you CommunicateYou should follow the newsgroups on your local ISP. You will not only get good information to keep you current, but you will also find opportunities to answer a question with a follow up posting that just happens to mention your relevant website (with full URL address on a separate line).
Use all regular forms of Business CommunicationsIf you have built your website as a means of generating traffic to your business and/or business website, be sure also to publicize your website by putting it on your letterhead, your business cards, your invoices, your advertising, and any other form of communication you use regularly to keep in touch with your customers and to pursue new prospects for your business. Don't believe in the axiom, "If you build it, they will come." They won't come if they don't know about it. Don't forget to put a brief description or the websites name along with its URL in your signature file for your e-mail system(s). Every time you e-mail someone you want to automatically advertise your website.
Reciprocal Links Reciprocal links are the word of mouth advertising of the internet. Do request them, but don't insist on reciprocal links. It doesn't work. But do provide a reciprocal link to any and all websites that link to yours, provided its the kind of website with which you want to be associated. Don't bother with the automatic link sites either. These listing of websites are not going to provide you with any worthwhile traffic
Monitoring the successof your on-line promotions
There are a few methods to monitor web and e-mail activity. They all serve a different purpose, and some provide overview while others give you the detail you may need. Take a look below at some of your options, and decide what is best for your promotion based on what you did.
Web site statistics
Most ISP's have detailed logs of your web activity, everything from Monthly Statistics, Daily Statistics, Day of Week Statistics, Hourly Statistics, most page views and most visits. Then they can provide general statistics such as; Top 10 Files by Number of Hits, Top 10 Files by Volume, Complete File Statistics, Top 10 Most Frequently Requested 404 Files (errors), Complete 404 File Not Found Statistics, and a break down of domain origins by country. Then you get page by page statistics, hits, keywords, and more.
This is sometimes in a raw format, but if you have done an e-mail blast or just put up a new banner someplace, this is a great place to come and see if the web hits have increased.
Use third party products such as Superstats
This product helps to quantify and qualify your various marketing efforts so you can have proof of success or find areas in need of work.
For general statistics you can look at The Referrers Report which details how people are finding your site—links from other websites (possibly an advertising campaign), various email or newsletter sponsorships or articles, search engines and more. It even provides you with the URL of the referring site, so you can see exactly where your hits are coming from. By paying close attention to this report, you can determine if a specific banner ad campaign has been successful (compare the percentage of hits coming from other websites and follow the referring links to see precisely who is sending you hits) or whether you need to boost your marketing efforts.
The Reference Report also allows you to monitor the success of on-site promotions.
Try setting up another page within your site that details a monthly promotion. Make your visitors aware of the promotion by advertising it on your homepage or sending an email. Then watch your Referrers Report to see how well the promotion does. The report will detail which link (email, homepage, etc.) is sending the most hits to your special promotion page so you can determine which format is most preferred by your audience and most effective for your site.
The only thing with these services, you usually have to display a banner for them
Set up separate web sites for ads and e-mail promotions
If the campaign is large, you may even want to set up an entirely new web site to monitor the progress and flow through of the ad and each page. Most ISP's allow you to set up 'sub domains'. These are domain names that go to your original account, ie. www.bravosw.com, but when the user invokes the sub domain name (ie. www.bravobucks.com) it is re-routed to a subdirectory on your site (that you must set up), and it looks like a completely new site, with new statistics for specialized monitoring. Sometimes these sub domains can cost a few dollars a month, but they are a great way to know exactly how that ad campaign did, and are no where near the expense and setup of setting up an actual new original domain name site.
Use HTML forms and separate e-mail addresses
When we are doing a banner ad or e-mail blast, to monitor the progress we set up either a completely new page that receives the click throughs from that ad, or an HTML form where they can make some sort of request that is also unique to the campaign. Select to see a FORM example. This form is then sent to a specific e-mail address, that once again is unique to the campaign. With our ISP, we can have unlimited e-mail addresses, that we control the set up of ourselves, and this is really convenient when it comes to seeing the actual results of a banner, or direct e-mail campaign.
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