eCommerce

BASIC CONCEPTS

The Customer – buys products

The Website Owner – ships bought products & gets paid

The eCommerce Application – interface between all the actors

The Payment Gateway – handles payment transactions (more on this later)

The Merchant/Business Bank Account – Website owner’s business bank account

Ecommerce analytics refer to the process of collecting and analyzing data relating to different aspects of your ecommerce operations.

BASIC CONCEPTS

The Customer – buys products

The Website Owner – ships bought products & gets paid

The eCommerce Application – interface between all the actors

The Payment Gateway – handles payment transactions (more on this later)

The Merchant/Business Bank Account – Website owner’s business bank account

Ecommerce analytics refer to the process of collecting and analyzing data relating to different aspects of your ecommerce operations.

Where Do You Start?

Our Approach

We jump into a lot of factors, like whether you have an existing site, the state of your product catalogs, how much custom functionality you need

Our Philosophy

We work closely with clients to recommend the very best solution for their unique needs, but if you’re still in preliminary thinking mode, here are some broad tips to get you started.

Think about the types of things you'll be selling on-line

How may products or types of services are you going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Do you have a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to use special offers & discounts?

Who are your customers? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal, Stripe, Bank Transfer or other? Which bank account will I need to set up?

Having a think about the products and services you’re going to offer is vital because the first thing a web designer is going to ask you when you’re requesting a quote is “How many things are you selling and to who?”

Ecommerce Business Models

When we look at ecommerce businesses, they typically take the form of one to two of these four different business models, depending on who is doing the buying and who is doing the selling. Like all good things in business, they crunch down nicely into four character acronyms:

Business-to-Business (B2B)

A B2B ecommerce is a business that is selling to another business. This could be a physical product, like raw building materials, or a service, like a corporate lawyer. It could also take the form of a digital product or service.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

As we are the consumers, this is the model used by most of our favorite brands. From fashion to furniture, gym memberships to wine subscriptions (more on those later), most of the stuff we buy for both ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ comes from a B2C brand.

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)

With consumer-to-consumer selling, there’s no business involved at all, and it’s usually a pretty casual setup. Think of a garage sale, or a platform like eBay.

Consumer-to-Business (C2B)

This is where a consumer sells their services to a business. Freelancers are the perfect example of this.