E-commerce is basically running an online business. To be more precise, buying/selling of goods/services over the internet denotes e commerce.
For trading goods online, you need a virtual online store or shop.
All the features of this shop will be more or less similar to a physical store with the only difference that is it is online.
A typical e-commerce website is also called as shopping cart site or online retail/wholesale store. Products are displayed on the screen, where users can select & put it in the shopping cart or basket. The program takes note of factors like number of products, quantity & price. The products are displayed from the inventory that is lying in the back-end.
Virtually, this is called a database. You also have option to search for a particular product or feature of a product from the database. Based on your inputs, the program fetches the product from the database & displays it to you. You can then drop it in your shopping cart. Once you are done with your shopping, you head for a check-out process, which basically allows you to enter credit card information for the price you are paying & gives you the details of shipping the product at your doorstep. This procedure is called a transaction. Usually, any e-commerce system contains all these features plus any other advanced features depending upon the requirement.
Building an e-commerce system is a complicated process; therefore it is not really advisable to build your own e-commerce system, especially if you are running a smaller business. The best solution is to find a hosting provider that offers a complete e-commerce hosting solution.
While looking for a provider who can offer e commerce web hosting services & solutions, you need to ensure many factors such as how this system handles orders, shipping, inventory, security, billing etc.
The above factors are just the basic few; depending upon your level of requirements, you will find anything from very simple to very complex features available from variety of hosting providers.
In a nutshell, to start an online store, you first need to have inventory of products that you intend to sell online. Then, you can approach any web company offering you a complete package of e-commerce hosting services & solutions, to develop & host your website. Once your e commerce site is ready, it is hosted on a dedicated/shared server sometimes fully managed where all the server administration tasks are handled by the hosting company.
