Guide to E-Commerce Web Hosting
Chapters
- What is a Web site?
- What is Web hosting?
- What is the procedure for building a Web presence?
- Guide to E-Commerce Web Hosting
- Which hosting plan fits my needs?
What is a Web store?
A Web store is a special-purpose Web site designed to display and sell products. Just like
traditional brick-and-mortar stores, Web stores can sell just a few products or thousands of
items, they can advertise their products, have sales, and accept various forms of payment.
Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, however, Web stores can reach customers all over the world,
instead of being limited to one city or neighborhood.
The Storefront
From a customer's point of view, a Web store is special-purpose Web site that offers products for
sale. A Web store has one or more pages that display and describe products, and a shopping cart
where customers can buy those products by giving their name and address and, typically, providing
credit card information. Beyond that, the look and feel of a Web store can vary quite a bit,
depending on the number and types of products being sold, and the taste and skill of the person
who designs the store!
The Back Office
Your view of the store as a merchant is quite different. Although your store is made up of pages,
and there are products for sale on those pages, you don't have to edit the store pages directly,
and you don't even have to know how to make a Web site or page. You access the store's back office
with your favorite browser, and add products and pages to your store by clicking on buttons and
filling in fields.
Your Web store will notify you when you have new orders, and it provides easy, secure access to
order information. Our Miva Merchant plans offer other advanced features so
that you can provide your customers with the easiest and most efficient online store available.
What is e-commerce Web hosting?
E-Commerce Web hosting adds an e-commerce application to a Web hosting account, which is what
allows you to have a store on the Internet.
What is a Web Host?
To have a Web site or store on the Internet you first need to have a Web server. Unfortunately,
owning a Web server can be very costly and requires technical expertise that most businesses
don't have. This is where Web hosts come in. Web hosting companies provide the equipment and
other technical resources that you need without the headaches that come when you have to do it
yourself.
Think of a Web host as the landlord of building. A landlord rents out storefronts to various
businesses. Each business decorates and runs their store differently, and doesn't worry about
the maintenance of the building. In a similar way a Web host rents out space on a Web server -
or entire Web servers - to various businesses. Each business builds its own Web store and never
has to worry about the maintenance of the Web server.
In other words, the Web host provides the place on the Internet where your Web store lives. It's
a lot cheaper than buying your own server, and you don't have to hire the technical staff to take
care of it.
What is an e-commerce application?
An e-commerce application is software that makes it easy for you to build and operate a Web store.
Online retail giants such as Amazon.com spend lots of money and hire large numbers of programmers
to build and maintain their site, but the Miva Merchant e-commerce application lets you do it from the comfort
of your own home or office without any programming!
The e-commerce application is server software, which means that it is installed and runs on the
AlpineWeb server - you don't have to install anything on your PC. You access it with your Web browser, and you simply click buttons and
fill out forms to build your store. You can check orders and make changes to your store from
any computer that has a connection to the Internet. It's easy to learn and easy to use, so you
can focus on running your store instead of learning a program.
What e-commerce applications does AlpineWeb recommend or offer?
AlpineWeb Design recommends Miva Merchant a market-leading
e-commerce application. AlpineWeb is a Certified
Miva Business Partner. Miva Merchant is available free with any FreeBSD Virtual Private Servers and Managed Private
Servers. See the Miva Merchant page for a complete
list of features.
How do I get started?
There are two primary tasks involved in building and opening a Web store: planning and implementation.
Planning
Having a successful Web store involves much more than just an "If you build it, they will
come" mentality. You aren't ready to get started until you've done a significant amount
of planning.
Decide What to Sell
The products that you offer for sale are - of course - a critical factor in ensuring the success of your store. Here are
some questions that you should consider when evaluating your product offerings:
- Uniqueness -
- Are you offering unique items for sale, meaning that they are either one-of-a-kind or
are not offered for sale anywhere else? Or are the products in your store easy to find in
other Web stores?
- Competition -
- If your products are also available from other Web stores, have you spent time
browsing in those stores? Have you compared their prices with what you plan to charge?
What is it about your store that will draw customers away from competitors' stores?
- Profit Margin -
- For products that you buy at wholesale, is your markup enough to provide you with
some profit? For products that you make, will you earn a fair return on the time that
you invested? Most merchants aren't trying to run their Web stores as non-profit
organizations!
Organize Your Products
The ease with which customers can find the products that they're looking for is a
critical factor in sales. If you are planning on selling more than one type of product,
you need to have planned out the organization of your store prior to building it. You
should categorize your products in ways that your customers are likely to look for them,
and then plan to place them on pages that reflect those categories. Obviously, a store
with thousands of products will require a more advanced organization.
Even great advertising can't replace good organization in helping your store to succeed.
A Picture is Worth...
Your store will be more useful and appealing to customers if you include pictures of each
product. You should also consider having an appealing logo on the first page of your
store, and perhaps a smaller version of the logo on all other pages.
Pictures must be in jpg or gif format. If you have the ability to scan and edit images
yourself, you can simply create the images and store them for later. Otherwise, hire a
graphic designer to take photographs, or use photographs that you supply, and use them
to produce images in jpg format. When you receive the images from the graphic artist,
store them on your computer. You'll be able to upload them to your Web store when
you're building your store.
Gather Product Information
Knowing what you're going to sell and having pictures of those items is a large part
of the preparation for building your store, but you should also gather other information
about your products. Having product information on hand will make building your store
much faster and less frustrating. Specifically, you should have:
- Product names.
- Product descriptions.
- Product pictures.
- Product prices.
- Product SKUs or other tracking numbers if you use that information for inventory and shipping.
- Product shipping weight, if you intend to charge for shipping by weight.
- Planning Payment, Tax, and Shipping Policies
Once you've planned your products, you need to plan for transaction processing and
fulfillment. Specifically:
What types of payment methods will you accept in your store? If you're planning on
accepting credit cards, how will you process those payments? You can perform offline
credit card processing, such as with a POS machine, or you can perform online credit
card processing. Any method of credit card processing requires that you have a merchant
account and an account with a transaction processing company.
How much tax do you need to collect, and from whom? If you are not already an
experienced merchant, you need to consult a tax expert who is familiar with tax laws
in your jurisdiction. Sales tax on Internet sales is still debated and misunderstood,
but generally you need to collect tax from customers in states where your store has
nexus - which is defined as a physical presence - even if it is just your office or
warehouse. You may also need to collect at a higher rate from customers in your home
city or county. You generally do not need to collect sales tax from customers in states
where your store does not have nexus. These are just general guidelines and may not
apply to your situation-consult a tax professional to make sure that your store
complies with the laws of your location.
What shipping methods will you offer and how much will you charge? Miva Merchant offer
real-time UPS shipping charges, and all plans offer many other methods of calculating
shipping charges, such as shipping by weight, shipping by currency (price), and
charging a base rate plus an additional amount for each product. You should register
or contract with a shipping service and find out what you need to know in order to
charge the correct amount for each product and shipment.
Implementation
Once you've completed your planning, you're ready to get started with the implementation.
Remember that you can start smaller and then upgrade your hosting plan when your
business grows and add additional features to build out your online store.
Once you're ready to move forward, visit the AlpineWeb
Order Forms and sign up for
that plan. Your account can be active in just a few hours, and your sales representative
can help you apply for merchant accounts and credit card processing, too. You can start
building your store while you wait for your application to be approved.
Once your account is set up, you'll receive an e-mail message that has a link to the
back office of your store. Click on that link and log in with your username and password,
and then the store building wizard will walk you through the steps of setting up your store.
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