E-Commerce Web Site Construction

We discussed the basics of e-commerce web sites, now how does a web developer put it all together? In a word: carefully!

Web Site Catalogs

When a online store offers more than a handful of items and/or the items come in different colors, styles and sizes, a catalog is needed to list all the products and their variations. Good shopping carts (see below) offer a catalog as part of the system. A catalog needs to accommodate sizes, styles, colors, pricing and both a short and long description of each item.

Shopping Carts are not Equal

The first selection should be the shopping cart. Shopping carts come in all sizes, prices and programming languages. We often use Cartweaver because of its versatility, the security it affords, adaptability, inclusion of a catalog and reasonable pricing.

Free shopping carts often come with little or no documentation. Frequently free shopping carts are not very flexible and may have security issues. We often find that it takes far more time to trouble all the security and adaptability issues in free shopping carts, than to start with a great shopping cart. So in the long run, free may have a huge cost.

Merchant Accounts and Payment Gateways

We discussed the needs for merchant accountsand payment gateways and the various issues that may encompass. The web developer constructing your shopping cart needs to know who is both your merchant account and payment gateway provider (which can be one and the same) to ensure the shopping cart used can interface with the payment gateway.

How Shopping Carts Work

Shopping carts allow your customers to place one or more items into the cart and hold all those items until the customer is ready to complete their purchase. This is usually done through "session cookies", a benign cookie that holds all the items together for one shopper and then expires within a short period (usually no more than 30 minutes) of time. Nothing is written to the users' computers.

Shopping Cart Check Out

When the shopper decides to "check out" (complete their purchase) all the items placed in the cart are added up and the user is presented with a list and total price. The shopping cart will then calculate shipping and handling costs based on the criteria set. Users may need to give their delivery address so actual shipping charges are calculated or the site owner may charge a set fee for shipping and handling. These choices are made when the cart is installed.

Better shopping carts can actually contact USPS and other shippers sites and get exact (or very close) charges for shipping based on weight and shipping address information. If shipping is to be charged by the total weight of purchases, each item input in a catalog must have an actual weight associated with it.

The customer is then presented with options (if any) for payment and lead by links to a secure payment gateway. If you ever are at this point in a shopping cart and the resulting URL doesn't start with https://, the payment process probably is not secure, so it's time to leave the site without giving any private information.

Once inside the secure payment gateway, customers will be asked for private information, including their credit card data. Once the entered information is run though an AVS checking system and payment is approved, the payment gateway will write back to the web site database in real time, indicating the payment approval. Most shopping carts then send both the purchaser and seller an email. The purchaser is notified that their transaction has been approved and items will be shipped (or can be downloaded) and the seller is notified that the shopping cart database has received an order.

Shopping Cart Administrative Area

When the web site owner enters the administrative part of the catalog and shopping cart, they will find the recorded the data necessary to ship the items to the customer. The administrative area requires a user name and password and should be kept in a secure area on the server.

It allows the owner to load products, change prices, add or changing shipping and tax data and verify inventory. Additional users can be added to the administrative area and passwords and user names changed as necessary.

Contact KatsueyDesignWorks today for your e-commerce needs!

If you need a great business web site, KatsueyDesignWorks is the place to start - and end - your search for a web site designer.

We provide:

• Custom Designs
• Custom Graphics
• CSS
• Search Ready
• Great Service
• Economical Prices
• Modern Browser Compliant