Introduction
Internet today is being increasingly used than ever and therefore is extremely important for any modern business. With over 500 millions searches per day for almost everything, adopting best technologies and content rich collaborative strategies mean a greater probability to reach out to customers beyond the physical boundaries.
ECommerce is all about selling and buying goods or services through the use of Internet. E-Commerce based on the business type as Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), and Consumer-to-Business (C2B) and Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C). There are variants of ECommerce participants
B2C (Business to Consumer) is where company sell good directly to the consumer, for example, a book seller company sell online book directly to the consumer. This company sell goods directly to customer, only difference is that, selling is performing via internet. Another example of B2C business is Supping Cart. B2B(Business to Business) is where one company is the business for another one, they are business to each other. There are thousands of companies which daily selling and buying our products, services on line. For example companies create goods and sell, they need raw material, this material comes from another company which sell raw material. This type of business call B2B. This type of business has a large infrastructure, complex productions to perform business events. These types of business give the order to another company via online and all the payment made, paid by using payment gateway or through e-transaction.C2B(Consumer to Business) is where consumer advertises his project with a budget and companies bid on the project. Consumer selects a company and gives work to him. C2C(Consumer to Consumer) is where anyone can buy and selling their goods online by using web site and send and receive payment by using payment gateways.
Opportunities
- Direct sales
- Pre sales
- After sales
- Importance of brand and reputation
- Getting the technology right for you
Many businesses are enjoying great results using effective eCommerce as a strategy to reach out to the potential customers globally as an effective and cheap way.
ECommerce Strategy
General Softwares Ltd. UK, offers you an implementation of the right eCommerce strategy to leverage the opportunities beyond your local sales boundaries and helps in the following ways:
- Identifying and global reach to customers
- Defining the business objectives clearly
- Lower cost of sales and marketing
- Result oriented success
- 24x7 services to customers
- Personalised approach in targetting the potential customers
- Better customer conversion rates
General Softwares Limited UK, adopting aspdotnetstorefront functionalities can help set up an online shop for you with extensive features:
Marketing and Promotion
- Gift Card Support (E-mail and Physical Gift Cards supported)
- Customer Add To Wish List Supported (Persists over Customer Visits also)
- Order Based Coupons (apply to entire order)
- Product Specific Coupons (apply to only specified product)
- Coupon discounts by amount or percent
- Coupons can offer free shipping
- Coupons can have expiration date
- Coupons can be marked as use once per customer, use once by only one customer, use N times, etc.
- Coupons requires minimum order amount before they are valid (e.g. save $10 if you order $100 or more, etc)
- Coupons can be excluded from sale products
- Customer specific coupons.
- Quantity discounts on products (tiered Pricing)
- E-Mail Product To A Friend: Product pages can be e-mailed to friends by site visitors
- Customers can review & rate products (if enabled)
- Administrator can moderate product review comments
- Profanity checking provided on product review comment entry
- User Polls (find out what your customers are thinking!)
- GoogleBase Feed (formerly called Froogle) Supported with automatic generation and FTP upload to your Froogle account
- Add other product feeds (e.g. ShopZilla, shopper.com, etc)
- Sales
- Related Products: Entice additional sales by listing related products/accessories on each product page
- Show Upsell Products Directly On Cart Page
- Product prices can be set to "Call for Price'
- Product prices can be hidden until product added to cart
- Products can require that other products are added to the cart (e.g. Product X requires Product Y)
- Recently viewed products
- Customers who bought X also bought Y
- Customers can be tracked to affiliates
- Orders can be tracked to affiliates
- Products visible on the site can be filtered by affiliate source id
- Real-Time skin changing based on URL/invocation/affiliate id
- Customer levels supported, which you can define (e.g. wholesale, retail, or gold, silver, platinum, etc..)
- Customers can be tracked to customer levels
- Customer levels can have special product pricing, can offer percent discounts, free shipping, tax exception, etc.
- Products visible on the site can be filtered by customer level
- Quantity discounts on products (tiered Pricing)
- E-Mail Product To A Friend: Product pages can be e-mailed to friends by site visitors
- Multiple Online Shops
- Multiple stores on separate domains can be run through one storefront install
- Features can be mapped to all stores or individual stores as desired. These include:
* Affiliates
* AppConfig Parameter Settings
* Coupons
* Customers
* Entities
* Feeds
* Gift Cards
* News
* Order Options
* Polls
* Products
* Ratings
* Shipping
* Skins
* String Resources
* Topics - Wildcard SSL certificates supported for subdomains (ie www.site.com/store1, www.site.com/store2, etc)
- Each store has its own name
- Product Management
- Categories/Departments/Manufacturers Supported
- Categories and Departments can also be fully nested to any level desired (e.g. sub-categories, sub-departments)
- Supports cross-matrix of products by category and department. E.g. a product can be mapped to the shoe category, in the women's department
- Products can be mapped to more than one category or department
- Paged browsing for categories and sections: Keeps page size small, and optimizes user experience.
Category, Department, and Manufacturer "names" can be renamed (e.g. "Brochures", "Products", "Car Parts", whatever you need that is appropriate for your unique store site products). - Disable buy buttons for specific products
- Supports Wholesale Only Sites
- Supports multiple images per product (icon, medium, and large)
- Support for swatch color image changing
- Automatic image watermarking for protection
- "Zoomify" Images Supported (requires separate service from Zoomify.com)
- Restrict product quantities to preset values (e.g. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, ...)
- Enforce product minimum order quantities (i.e. must order at least 10, etc).
- Recurring products can have varying intervals (days, weeks, months, years)
- Subscription based products & content access
- Downloadable products supported, with automatic e-mail to customer with download instructions
- Text options on products (e.g. require initials for monogrammed products, require text name for product customization, etc)
- Support for sizes & colors. All color/size site "prompts" can be customized in admin site, so you could rename those two options to have completely different meaning.
- Two Attributes Per Product (e.g. Size/Color)
- Inventory By Attribute (e.g. Size/Color)
- Price can vary by size/color option chosen
- Prices can vary by customer or customer level (group)
- Sort products in any order desired
- Support for simple products (e.g. a book) or products with variants
- Setup variants within each product
- Inventory Tracking
- Limit orders to quantity on hand inventory, or allow customers to place orders for items out of stock (admin configurable)
- Manage Inventory by variant or attribute (e.g. size, color, etc)
- Show inventory on hand status on product page to customer (optional)
- Payments and Checkout
- Credit Cards: Accept Credit Cards in Real Time: Cards can be processed & verified in real-time, or you can delay processing until a later time
- Check By Mail
- e-Checks (Authorize.net and Itransact gateways)
- MyECheck
- Purchase Order
- Request For Quote
- MicroPay (this is also referred to as a Purse). Customer can put money in an account, and then purchase against it, or add to their balance
- Backup Gateways - never miss an order due to problems with your gateway! Simply set up an alternate gateway (separate gateway account required) and the site will roll over to that if the primary gateway fails.
- Gift Cards
- Skip account creation on checkout (Anonymous Checkout)
- Payment Gateways