E-Commerce Tools: Using Third-Party Vendors

Another is option is to use a vendor who includes everything you need to get your online business started. This is certainly a more painless way to go than designing and developing everything yourself and then hoping all of the elements will work together happily.

There are some reputable companies that offer these types of services, and many will include not only the Web site design, shopping cart software and merchant account, but also they will register your domain name(s) and host your site for you. Others provide templates and wizards that let you build your site yourself without having to know HTML coding. They include integrated shopping cart software that ties in with an included merchant account.

If you decide to go this route, keep these things in mind:

... Read more »

Build Your Own Site: Making Pre-Set Templates Your Own

This part of your site design gets a little trickier. Most of the WYSIWYG Web authoring programs come with templates that you can edit to suit your needs. It's a good way to introduce yourself to Web design -- by using someone else's! It can also produce some professional-looking results.

One way to personalize your site while still using a template is to create your own top and side navigation banners. By using the same dimensions of the template's navigation graphics, you can make sure yours still fit and don't throw off the rest of the page.

You can also change the color palette of the site. Matching the color of your logo and creating new graphics in the same style as your logo will help pull the site together and give it a more consistent look and feel. But what is lo ... Read more »

Why the Hype?

There is a huge amount of hype that surrounds e-commerce. Given the similarities with mail order commerce, you may be wondering why the hype is so common. Take, for example, the following quotes:

• "...the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2005, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, was $22.3 billion, an increase of 5.7 percent (±1.7%) from the second quarter of 2005."-- U.S. Census Bureau
• "2004 online retail sales rose 23.8 percent to $89 bil ... Read more »