What is eCommerce and How does it Work?
Electronic Commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.
There are a variety of components that go into the making of an eCommerce enabled website. What follows is a brief overview of these components and a description of the tools available through InfoQuest to enable them. The three main areas you'll need to address are:
- Shopping Carts
- Credit Card Processing
- Payment Gateways
Shopping Carts
There are an abundance of shopping carts available for websites. In fact, there are so many options it can literally make your head spin. In order to keep things simple, we'll discuss carts that can be implemented into an existing website via content management software, carts that are purchased from 3rd party providers and installed in your website, and cart solutions that run external to your website.
Carts Integrated with Content Management Systems
Several open source (free) content management solutions "CMS" have either incorporated shopping cart software into their base offering or have made it possible for you to purchase and install shopping carts designed to integrate with the CMS.
DotNetNuke
There is a basic shopping cart integrated into DotNetNuke "DNN". Additionally, several vendors have created DotNetNuke shopping cart modules. A good place to find shopping cart modules that work with DNN is through the DotNetNuke Marketplace or a site called Snowcovered. Here are a few of the more popular DNN shopping cart modules available through these sites:
Joomla!
Another open source CMS, Joomla provides the ability to install extensions. One of the popular ecommerce extensions for Joomla! is called Virtuemart. VirtueMart is an Open Source eCommerce solution to be used together with a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla! (but also works with Mambo). Joomla and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made for easy use in a PHP / MySQL environment.
Learn more about Virtuemart
Credit Card Processing
Accept credit cards on-line, over the phone or for mail orders today!
MerchantPlus offers the Internet's best all-inclusive package for accepting credit cards on-line, over the phone or for mail orders! In addition to years of experience enabling Internet businesses, our rates are unbeatable and we guarantee you won't find a better deal anywhere.
Internet Merchant Account and Gateway - Only 2.15%!
Payment Gateways
Authorize.net - accept credit cards and electronic checks anytime, anywhere.
The Authorize.Net Payment Gateway can help you accept credit card and electronic check payments quickly and affordable. More than 212,000 merchants trust Authorize.Net to manage their transactions, help prevent fraud, and grow their business.