E-Commerce

If you sell a product or service and your business has a site on the Internet, developing an e-commerce site may be critical to your continued success. Businesses today can no longer afford to think locally as did their brick-and-mortar predecessors. Instead, because customers may be across the street or on the other side of the world, businesses must think globally, and an e-commerce site expands your business into the global marketplace like no brick and mortar business ever could.

There are several ways that you can develop and e-commerce site and provide a store front and shopping cart for your business. You can hire a consultant to design and develop an e-commerce application, you can use a vendor, or you can develop your own e-commerce application. This article explains each of these options and helps you determine which best suits your businesses needs.

Hiring a Consultant

Hiring a consultant to develop an entire e-commerce solution can be expensive and may be beyond the reach of many small businesses. However, consultants can help you better understand how your business can benefit from providing online sales and can help you plan how to proceed, and help you avoid many common pitfalls. In many cases, a consultant can help you do the preliminary planning work of determining markets and projected sales, as well as mapping out a rollout plan. This type of planning is critical to the success of any e-commerce business.

If you have already done the planning, you can hire consultants to develop part or all of a custom e-commerce solution that works for your business. This may be the best approach if you have a medium to large business and do not have in-house developers. Other factors that may indicate that you need a custom e-commerce solution might be that you plan on selling a large number of products over the Internet (which may require a more robust database application than a vendor might provide to store both product and customer information), or you plan on targeting several markets internationally (which may, and in some cases does, require localized pages for each market).

If you are interested in talking with a consultant, you can find a list of consultants who partner with Microsoft in the Microsoft Small Business Consultant Directory. You may also find e-commerce experts who specialize in working with FrontPage in newsgroups and among the FrontPage MVPs (Most Valued Professionals). For more information, see Ask the FrontPage Community on Office Online.

Using a Vendor

If you already have a plan in place for providing online sales and just need to set up your e-commerce site, vendors such as Microsoft Commerce Manager, PayPal, and NetStores can provide the infrastructure your Web site needs to create a store front and shopping cart and process credit card payments with little or no development on your part. Vendors provide products and services that are useful for small to medium sized businesses that either do not have in-house developers or don't have the resources to hire a consultant to plan, design, and build a custom shopping cart or house secure Web servers for processing credit card payments. Also, in many cases, vendors provide FrontPage add-ins that you can use to create a shopping cart and manage an online store in FrontPage along within your existing Web site.

There are a variety of different vendors, and prices can vary between vendors, so you should research each vendor carefully before choosing one. If they process credit card payments, make sure that the payments are processed on a secure server that uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for data transfer. Without secure processing, customer and payment information is transmitted in clear text, allowing hackers to easily intercept and read sensitive information. Note that if your e-commerce Web site URL does not start with "https" (as opposed to "http"), data that is transmitted is not secure. (You can find security resources in the Security section.)

The following resources can help you find vendors and choose which vendor is right for your needs.

Developing a Custom Solution

If you have determined that you need to develop a custom e-commerce application, the information provided here should help you get started. Developing an e-commerce application involves a combination of several steps and difference technologies.

Planning

Planning an e-commerce Web site is as critical to business success as developing a business or marketing plan. However, because an e-commerce Web site is basically software, you need to do more than just plan how you will market and promote your e-commerce Web site. You also need to plan how you develop your solution just as you would plan the development of any software application. For example, which technologies will you use to write the code and store the data? Where will you host your e-commerce Web site? Will you develop some parts and vend others? What will your shopping cart look like, and how will customers navigate through your products? All of this and more needs to be included in your e-commerce Web site development plan.

Note  Even if you plan to use a vendor to create your e-commerce Web site or hire a consultant to develop a custom e-commerce solution, you should still include in your site plan information about the technologies or tools that your e-commerce Web site uses even if you do not plan on using these personally.

If you have never planned a software application, you may consider hiring a consultant to help you with this process. Alternatively, there are resources online that explain software planning and the Software Development Life cycle (also called System Development Life cycle). Here are a few resources that you may find helpful when planning your e-commerce Web site solution.

Databases

For your e-commerce solution, you will need to plan a database that stores information about your products, of course, but you may also want to store information about your customers. For example, you may want to store customer shipping information, and you might want to keep track of what customers have ordered in the past. Both of these require that a customer log in before placing orders, so you may also need to store user IDs and passwords, and if your customers have account numbers, you may need to maintain that information in the database as well.

Note   Storing passwords, user IDs, account numbers and other sensitive customer information requires secure processing. For more information about security, see the Security section.

Planning the schema for your database is important to ensure that the database has all the necessary information. The following resources are just a few that you will find online for planning your database.

Web Applications

Web applications provide the visual interface and the internal processing your e-commerce solution needs to access data in a database and process orders and payments. You can develop an e-commerce Web application using any server-side programming technology, such as ASP or ASP.NET. Generally, the server-side programming technology that you choose depends upon the languages that you know.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology that you can use to create dynamic Web pages. ASP code is generally embedded in the HTML within a page, and HTML pages that contain ASP have an .asp extension; however, because processing is done on the server, the ASP code is not sent to the browser, and visitors to your site will never see your ASP code. Client computers receive only the resulting HTML.

Although generally used with Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript), you can also use ASP with JavaScript or JScript. When used with VBScript, you can use ASP for database processing, form processing, and other Web applications that require server interaction, such as sending mail and reading or changing the contents of files that are located on the server.

ASP.NET is the next generation of server-side processing. You can write ASP.NET code in C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++, or any language that is supported by the .NET Framework. Because ASP.NET is part of the .NET Framework, you can develop ASP.NET applications that utilize any of the namespaces and classes that are part of the .NET Framework.

ASP.NET is a robust server-side programming platform that allows you to create both simple and complex e-commerce solutions and provides the level of security needed for e-commerce applications that other server-side programming platforms may not. In addition, because ASP.NET code is compiled rather than embedded within the page, e-commerce solutions that use ASP.NET have better performance than those that use classic ASP or other similar scripting languages. For a sample e-commerce solution, see the ASP.NET Commerce Starter Kit under Related Resources.

For more information on ASP and ASP.NET, see the following resources.

Processing Credit Cards

To accept payments for e-commerce transactions, you usually need to provide credit card processing. Just as with brick-and-mortar stores, you need a merchant account to accept credit card payments. However, there are ways to accept credit card payments without a dedicated merchant account. Often vendors, like PayPal, provide credit card processing services, or your Web hosting provider may provide online payment processing with their Web hosting services. Check with your Web presence provider to determine if their services meet your needs. For a list of vendors that provide credit card processing, do an internet search for "e-commerce credit card processing."

Security

Whatever e-commerce solution you develop, you should be aware of the level of security that e-commerce solutions require. Customers who buy goods online both expect and deserve the comfort of knowing that their transactions are secure and their information is safe. If you are hosting your e-commerce solution on your own server, use server software, such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Commerce Server, that provides a high level of security for handling sensitive information and that uses SSL. If you are purchasing any portion of your solution, such as credit card processing, from a vendor, you should know about any security measures that the vendor takes to keep your customers' information secure.

The following resources should help you understand the underlying technologies that provide security for Internet transactions. The information contained in these resources should help you know what questions that you need to ask consultants, vendors, and hosting companies about the security of your e-commerce Web site.

See Also