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The following information deals with selling products online.
- What is a Web site?
- What is Web hosting?
- What is the procedure for building
a Web presence?
- Guide to E-Commerce Web Hosting
- Which hosting plan fits my needs?
A Web store is a special-purpose Web site designed to display and
sell products. Just like traditional brick-and-mortar stores, Web
stores can sell just a few products or thousands of items, they
can advertise their products, have sales, and accept various forms
of payment. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, however, Web stores
can reach customers all over the world, instead of being limited
to one city or neighborhood.
The Storefront
From a customer's point of view, a Web store is special-purpose
Web site that offers products for sale. A Web store has one or more
pages that display and describe products, and a shopping cart where
customers can buy those products by giving their name and address
and, typically, providing credit card information. The look and
feel of a Web store can vary quite a bit, depending on the number
and types of products being sold, and the taste and skill of the
person who designs the store!
Fulfilling Orders
This will require you to have a merchant account (Call
1-800-428-6572 for help getting one). When the customers
makes a purchase, you would be notified by email that an order came
in. Your store could process the transaction(s) either of the following
ways:
- manually - you would retrieve the customer information and enter
it manually into your POS (Point of Sale) terminal, or a "Virtual
Terminal" provided
- real time processing - this automatically takes the information
and verifies it, letting you know whether the credit card was
approved or not
If you have one of our E-commerce
Plans  Each
time an order comes in you will be notified via E-mail. This email
will have a Product Description, Product ID#, and let you know who
placed the order. To manually process their credit card information
you will need to log in to your Web Control Panel and click on the
"View Completed Orders" link in your Commerce Tools. You
can then process their card online on your Virtual Terminal, or
use the terminal of your choice.
Note:
If you would like the customers' credit cards to be processed automatically,
there is a one-time fee of $49 to set up your "Real-Time Processing".
2SERVEU Commerce Hosting and Enterprise Hosting plans offer advanced
features so that you can provide your customers with the easiest
and most efficient online store available. All customer information
is stored online in a secure database. You can easily access this
information by logging into your Web Control Panel. Orders are automatically
entered into the database and can be viewed many ways (individually,
by month, from /to date, etc.) Orders can also be viewed as a Reports
spreadsheet, or downloaded at any time for accounting and inventory
purposes.
E-Commerce Web hosting adds an e-commerce application to a Web
hosting package, which is what allows you to have a store on the
Internet. There are basically 2 kinds of E-commerce Web hosting:
- Built-In: This means the e-commerce software applications
are pre-installed on the web server, so you don't have to install
anything! These Hosting Plans are designed specifically for doing
business on the web. They would include a secure internet connection,
an SSL Certificate, a database, and have all of your E-commerce
Tools built right in. This would and allow you to easily set up
your storefront, create links for each of your products, and view
/ process orders over a secure connection.
- Add-on: This is a Web hosting plan that allows you to
easily add on a specific brand of E-commerce software and have
it integrate into your web site. You would have to go to their
website for documentation and support, since it is an Add-on application.
You may also need to purchase a secure connection and an SSL Certificate,
or rent a payment gateway for payment processing.
2SERVEU offers 2 Hosting Plans specifically designed for E-commerce.
These plans offer everything you need to build, maintain, and run
an online storefront. The orders are processed over a secure website
(included), and all order information is automatically stored on
an MS Access database for viewing, download, etc. View
E-commerce Plans!
What is an e-commerce application?
An e-commerce application is software that makes it easy for you
to build and operate a Web store. Online retail giants such as Amazon.com
spend lots of money and hire large numbers of programmers to build
and maintain their site, but 2SERVEU offers e-commerce applications
that let you do it from the comfort of your own home or office without
any programming!
The e-commerce application is server software, which means that
it is installed and runs on the server - you don't have to install
anything on your PC. You access it with your Web browser, and you
simply click buttons and fill out forms to build your store. You
can check orders and make changes to your store from any computer
that has a connection to the Internet. It's easy to learn and easy
to use, so you can focus on running your store instead of learning
a program.
Built-In Ecommerce
2SERVEU offers special Hosting Plans that are made for Ecommerce
and have all the applications already Built-In. Our 2 E-commerce
Plans enable you to easily create your online store, choose
the colors and buttons for your shopping cart, add products, and
process orders via a secure connection with these Built-In Applications:
Add-on Ecommerce
2SERVEU also offers a multitude of Ecommerce Add-on applications
that are much more affordable, and allow you the freedom of setting
up your own store just the way you want it. They include:
Our Unix Hosting Plans now offer 4 affordable
Shopping Cart choices:
1) osCommerce
, 2) Cube
Cart , 3) Zen
Cart , or the 4) Agora
Shopping Cart
All with easy "1 click" installation using Cpanel
/ Fantastico
We also offer the Soholaunch Pro
Ecommerce Plugins that
enables Novices to create an Online Store with No Experience!
Sign Up for a FREE TRIAL
SSL certificate - Each of our servers has a server-wide SSL
certificate installed. You have free access to this certificate
for your hosting account. (i.e. https://....).
This allows you to secure e-commerce websites so your customers
can securely transmit credit information to you.
We can also create and install your own Certificate
for as little as $30 /yr.
There are two primary tasks involved in building and opening a
Web store: planning and implementation.
Planning
Having a successful Web store involves much more than just an "If
you build it, they will come" mentality. You aren't ready to get
started until you've done a significant amount of planning.
Decide What to Sell
The products that you offer for sale are - of course - a critical
factor in ensuring the success of your store. Here are some questions
that you should consider when evaluating your product offerings:
Uniqueness - Are you offering unique items for sale, meaning
that they are either one-of-a-kind or are not offered for sale anywhere
else? Or are the products in your store easy to find in other Web
stores?
Competition - If your products are also available from other
Web stores, have you spent time browsing in those stores? Have you
compared their prices with what you plan to charge? What is it about
your store that will draw customers away from competitors' stores?
Profit Margin - For products that you buy at wholesale,
is your markup enough to provide you with some profit? For products
that you make, will you earn a fair return on the time that you
invested? Most merchants aren't trying to run their Web stores as
non-profit organizations!
Organize Your Products
The ease with which customers can find the products that they're
looking for is a critical factor in sales. If you are planning on
selling more than one type of product, you need to have planned
out the organization of your store prior to building it. You should
categorize your products in ways that your customers are likely
to look for them, and then plan to place them on pages that reflect
those categories.
Obviously, a store with thousands of products will require a more
advanced organization.
Even great advertising can't replace good organization in helping
your store to succeed.
A Picture is Worth...
Your store will be more useful and appealing to customers if you
include pictures of each product. You should also consider having
an appealing logo on the first page of your store, and perhaps a
smaller version of the logo on all other pages.
Pictures must be in jpg or gif format. If you have the ability
to scan and edit images yourself, you can simply create the images
and store them for later. Otherwise, hire a graphic designer to
take photographs, or use photographs that you supply, and use them
to produce images in jpg format. When you receive the images from
the graphic artist, store them on your computer. You'll be able
to upload them to your Web store when you're building your store.
Gather Product Information
Knowing what you're going to sell and having pictures of those
items is a large part of the preparation for building your store,
but you should also gather other information about your products.
Having product information on hand will make building your store
much faster and less frustrating. Specifically, you should have:
- Product names.
- Product descriptions.
- Product pictures.
- Product prices.
- Product SKUs or other tracking numbers if you use that information
for inventory and shipping.
- Product shipping weight, if you intend to charge for shipping
by weight.
Planning Payment, Tax, and Shipping Policies
Once you've planned your products, you need to plan for transaction
processing and fulfillment. Specifically:
- What types of payment methods will you accept in your store?
If you're planning on accepting credit cards, how will you process
those payments? You can perform offline credit card processing,
such as with a POS machine, or you can perform online credit card
processing with our E-commerce Hosting plans. Any method of credit
card processing requires that you have a merchant account and
an account with a transaction processing company. 2SERVEU can
help you sign up for those accounts.
- How much tax do you need to collect, and from whom? You will
need to collect tax from customers in states where your store
has nexus - which is defined as a physical presence - even if
it is just your office or warehouse. You may also need to collect
at a higher rate from customers in your home city or county. You
generally do not need to collect sales tax from customers in states
where your store does not have nexus. These are just general guidelines
and may not apply to your situation-consult a tax professional
to make sure that your store complies with the laws of your location.
- What shipping methods will you offer and how much will you charge?
E-Vendor and Marketplace plans offer real-time UPS shipping charges,
and all plans offer many other methods of calculating shipping
charges, such as shipping by weight, shipping by currency (price),
and charging a base rate plus an additional amount for each product.
You should register or contract with a shipping service and find
out what you need to know in order to charge the correct amount
for each product and shipment.
Implementation
Once you've completed your planning, you're ready to get started
with the implementation. We can help you find the right kind of
hosting plan if you Click HERE,
then you can decide on the size vs. price. Remember that you can
start smaller and then upgrade your plan when your business grows,
but the additional features in the E-Vendor and Marketplace plans
can help your store to grow more quickly.
After you've picked a plan, call a 2SERVEU sales representative
at 1-800-428-6572 and sign up for that plan. Your account can be
active in just a few hours, and your sales representative can help
you apply for merchant accounts and credit card processing, too.
You can start building your store while you wait for your application
to be approved.
Once your account is set up, you'll receive an e-mail message that
has a link to the back office of your store. Click on that link
and log in with your username and password, and then the store building
wizard will walk you through the steps of setting up your store.
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