What is An ECommerce Website
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What Is ECommerce Itself
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Ecommerce or electronic commerce is the trading of goods and services on the internet. It is your bustling city center or brick-and-mortar shop translated into zeroes and ones on the internet superhighway. This year, an estimated 2.14 billion people worldwide will buy goods and services online, and the number of Prime members shopping Amazon stores now tops 150 million. Ecommerce one way among many that people buy and sell things in retail. Some companies sell products online only, but for many, ecommerce is a distribution channel that’s part of a broader strategy that includes physical stores and other revenue streams. Either way, ecommerce allows startups, small businesses, and large companies to sell their products at scale and reach customers across the world.
What Is An ECommerce Website
Ecommerce or electronic commerce refers to a business model that involves sales transactions being done on the web. Virtually every online shopping website - big or small - follows this structure. Any site where you can obtain items for sale over the internet is considered an ecommerce website.
eBay and Amazon, the grandfathers of eCommerce, paved the way for a newer and more convenient way of shopping. They are actually not that old to be called grandfathers, but a higher level of respect is implied there. Of course, online buying and selling were already a thing before, but because of these companies, e-commerce websites became an easier and more preferred platform to a lot of consumers.
People were very skeptical to use these sites to purchase their items there because they are prone to fraudulent activities and scamming schemes. It is still evident up to this day, but developers come up with solutions to better people’s shopping experience. Examples of these solutions are reviews, return policy, and cash on delivery. These features help consumers decide if they should purchase items from an e-commerce website or not.
One of the obvious differences between an eCommerce website and an ordinary business or company website is in the features that it supports. A company website may just house information on the brand’s products and services so users will need to contact the company directly if they want to do business with them. Meanwhile, an eCommerce website works pretty much like how a physical store works. Users can purchase items, arrange for delivery, and payments on the same site without the need to call a human person to help them with their order. When you start learning how to create eCommerce website content, you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated to put up an online store compared to an ordinary website because of the features and design elements that the former requires.
There are a lot of eCommerce websites selling a variety of items now. From clothing pieces to food items to gardening materials, one must be creative to make his or her brand more unique than the other. Even social media accounts are becoming eCommerce platforms and are developed to be eCommerce websites nowadays. The only difference is that on an e-commerce website, you don’t have to deal with a human to be able to buy and get your items delivered to your doorstep. An eCommerce website must be as functional as it is with or without the owners or managers monitoring the site and dealing with their customers every second of the day.
How Does An ECommerce Website Work?
An eCommerce Website Typically Work Like This:
1. A potential customer navigates to an eCommerce website, whether via search engines, paid advertisements, referral traffic, etc.
2. The eCommerce website connects to its database, which contains tons of data about the website’s categories, products, product dimensions and weight, articles and content, images, etc. The website requests this data to dynamically render any requested web pages.
3. After browsing the eCommerce website, a potential customer adds a product or service to their virtual shopping cart and decides to check out.
4. The shopper completes the checkout process and finalizes the transaction.
5. The shopper’s credit card information is encrypted and sent to a Payment Gateway(Paypal, for example) to handle the credit card processing securely and remotely.
6. Once the order is complete, and the payment has gone through, the website typically provides an estimated shipping time, a unique transaction number, postal tracking number, etc. Most of these processes are automated and part of a good eCommerce website’s core functionality.
7. As transactions take place, orders are stored in the website admin and sent to an order fulfillment team. Order fulfillment can be done in-house or by a third-party company/drop shipper.
