E-COMMERCE
Selling Products Online
As the internet has become pervasive in people's lives, on-line trade has increased dramatically. In some business segments, online shopping has significantly out-grown traditional "brick and mortar" shopping. Any business selling products which can be shipped or downloaded is likely missing out on a large customer base if they don't have the ability to trade on-line.
Shore Fx can help you understand the technical requirements for setting up an on-line store that meets your current requirements, budget and future plans. We are familiar with a wide variety of shopping cart applications. Similar to a CMS system for your web site, these applications provide both a front-end web site for your shoppers to browse, research and purchase products as well as an administration interface that allows you to manage your product catalog, pricing, inventory, payment processing options etc. In addition to a store front or shopping cart system you need a method for processing payments. There are a variety of payment processing options from budget pay per transaction (Eg. Paypal) to more tightly coupled services that can consolidate online and offline credit card processing.
The Best Solution for Your Business
Before you make any decisions about how or what you might use to sell products online and process transactions, there are some important questions to ask yourself. Shore Fx has developed a questionaire to help guide you through this complex process.
We will walk you through this question and answer process to ensure we propose the best solution for both your online and offline trading requirements.
Security
If you plan to accept payments online, transaction security must be considered. In fact for credit card processing there are legal requirements and liability issues related to the storage of customer data. The first step is to offer a secure web site connection for your shoppers. Visitors will often not shop on a site that does not enable a secure connection between their browser and your site. Typically indicated with an address of the form "https://...". Shore Fx can obtain the necessary security certificates for your web site and install them within your Shore Fx hosting package.