E-commerce
is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet.
Selling
Products – Hard Good and E-Goods
You
can sell hard goods from your business, as well as e-goods, which
are down-loadable products such as e-books, software and videos.
You
can stock and ship the hard goods yourself, or you can use a third
party drop shipping service to handle all the order processing
for
you.
If
your product can be sold as a physical product or also as an e-product,
such as books, information or software, you should look
into digital
marketplaces like Clickbank. Clickbank is the leading internet
retailer of E-goods. The most powerful feature of Clickbank is
that people
can easily find and promote your products on their websites.
All they have
to do is paste a special link that sends customers through the
ClickBank site for payment, and then on to your site for products
download.
Affiliate
Marketing – Recommending the products and services
of others. This little-known aspect of e-commerce involves placing
specially coded links on your site that take the visitor to the online
store
of another company.
Example: the online
store of LittleShamrocks.com does not actually sell any
products but links to the online store of FoodIreland.com.
LittleShamrocks.com’s function as the affiliate site is to pre-sell
the visitor and create demand for the affiliate partner’s
products. With sections on Ireland Travel and Irish Recipes,
the site creates
interest and demand for Irish food.
Basic
E-commerce Tools
Mailing
List – It is important to collect the names and email
addresses on visitors to your website so you can stay
in touch with them to invite them back to the website and also market
other offers
to them if you want to. If your website host does not
include a mailing list service, I recommend a dedicated email list
service like AWeber.com or GetResponse.com,
or you can get a hosting service that includes a mailing list like
Site
Build It.
They
manage the collection of names and the list, send out emails, give
you the stats on how many were read,
and remove
any invalid
addresses. They handle the whole mess for you, and
you can even set up a schedule
for a whole season of newsletters all at once. They
also keep the list safe for you. That list is money, and you
don't want
the only
copy
just on your home computer.
To
get names into the mailing list you just add the name and the email
address box code to your website
and visitors
then
add their
info,
which is linked to the mailing list service.
A
Shopping Cart service allows visitors to select items for purchase,
calculates shipping costs and
any other
costs and
discounts,
such as coupons or promotions, and then passes
the total to your credit
card
merchant account for payment.
Google
Checkout is a combination of a merchant account and a single-item
shopping cart. This is
the easiest
way to get
started
with an online
store by selling single items. Just sign up for
Google Checkout and you can make Buy
Now buttons
that you
can just paste
into your web
page. You can upgrade Google Checkout to use
a shopping cart as you expand.
Cafepress.com and Lulu.com are digital print-on-demand services that make it really
easy to offer on
your website just about
anything that can be printed from a digital
file, such as posters, prints,
t-shirts,
books, cards, and lots more. You just upload
your artwork or book, pick the formats you
want to sell,
and add
images and
links on
your
website to the store items.
Membership
Websites collect monthly or yearly fees for access to special information
on a
web site.
Part of
the website
is open
to the public
and is used to promote the membership section
of the site.
Next --
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