E-Commerce
- definition: commercial transactions conducted electronically on the
internet.
Web
hosting - definition: The activity or business of providing storage
space or access for websites.
Web
hosting and e-commerce are two separate functions.
In
fact, a website is not necessarily required for e-commerce. You could
promote and
sell products and services thru e-commerce using email or postal
mail for
example.
E-commerce
transactions are most often performed by a separate website service
called a Shopping Cart. The common functions of a Shopping
Cart are adding & removing items to be purchased, calculating the sale
total including taxes & shipping, then the payment is usually processed
by another web service called a Gateway. Some shopping carts also offer
marketing features such as mailing lists, automated mailings & customer
surveys.
The
main website issue related to e-commerce is the hosting capacity. Will
your site be getting large amounts of traffic (thousands of
page view per day) or will you be hosting videos on your site?
Both of these
usually require web hosting plans with additional capacity.
Even
basic hosting plans that offer "unlimited" service are
not completely without limits ( be sure to read the Terms
of Service ). You may need a hosting plan that offers higher capacity
than a basic
plan, or you may need to upgrade to higher capacity hosting
as you grow, but this is a separate issue from the e-commerce transactions
that are
processed by the shopping cart.
All
shopping carts are hosted on their own separate high-capacity servers
and should be able to handle any amount of orders that
your site can
generate. If you need to move your site to higher capacity
hosting you shouldn't need to make any changes to your shopping
cart
setup.
E-commerce
is one of the many ways to monetize a website. Other monetization methods
are selling ads, collecting email
addresses
and customer
leads, or promoting the products and services of others.
Monetization
is considered to be one of the last steps in building a business
website. A website must be properly
researched,
designed, built,
and promoted so that it is getting sufficient traffic,
and the right kind of traffic, to support the time & expense
of setting up and running an e-commerce shopping cart.
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