ecommerce

Venturing into the Exciting World of Ecommerce15 November 2011

It all started in 2001 with 800 DJ Promo Disco Vinyl Records. We had them - how do we sell them?

I had been online since 1998 as a graphic designer so I was not a newcomer to the internet nor of selling my talents. But selling a specific product was not something I had ever considered. Where do I sell these records? How much are they worth? Who would want them? How do I get started?

Online Shopping was just getting off the ground and Ecommerce was new and exciting to think about. Knowing nothing about Ecommerce I spend quite a lot of time reading whatever I could find to educate myself to its pros and cons. A friend told me about eBay which had been around since 1997. I had never been to eBay - had no idea what it was all about - but I pointed my browser to the site and never looked back.

Learing the ropes of eBay was not hard. Read all of the directions, learn how to list, open an eBay store and you are in business.

My partner and I spend hours and hours searching for information about vinyl records, We learned how to grade them, what genre each record fell into, and histories of the artists.
We took pictures of the records to be uploaded to our eBay store and listened to every records so we could grade it accurately. We researched each record to learn everything we could about the artist, the lable, the producer. Finally we felt qualified to start listing on eBay.

Oh, the thrill of that first sale!! We were hooked. During the next two years we listed records on a non stop basis. We sold almost all of them and made a very good profit. When we ran out of records to sell we started looking around the house for things to list. We sold off collectibles, dishes, clothes, shoes, and whatever else we could find that we didn't want anymore. Finally we just ran out of stuff to sell.

A friend of ours said she had started making Italian Charms. Georgia foundation repair . Well, frankly,I had no idea at all what Italian Charms were!! I checked them out online and found out that they are small rectangular interchangeable charms featuring a design on the face of them. I determined that if she could make them so could I.

I thought my backgound as a graphic designer would come in handy in designing for these little charms. It never crossed my mind to just buy ready made enamel and laser charms to resell - I wanted to make something different and unique.

I started making designs of butterflies, flowers, animals, places, etc. michigan . After many trials and errors we learned how to affix them to the base stainless steel charm and cover them with a clear, waterproof acryllic coating. We listed them on eBay and to our utter amazement they sold!!

Most of our time from then on was taken up by creating designs and making the charms. The nice thing about all of this is that we didn't need to make the charms until they were ordered so there was no inventory to keep except the raw materials needed. And, we loved making them!

After another year we decided to branch out and get our own website. We put up one page and redirected it to our eBay store. We soon decided that it was time to get out of eBay and concentrate on building up our website.

I knew absolutely nothing about shopping carts. That was an adventure in itself but I read and researched and finally had a rudimentary understanding of what they were all about.

I started building our webstore. Since I was a graphic designer and had built quite a few personal websites for other people I figured I knew what I was doing. I did not use one of the ecommerce hosting sites. I used a private host and had to implement everything myself. Page by page it began to emerge right before my eyes until I had over 400 pages of Italian Charms.

Putting up a website is the easy part - learning how to successfully sell your product is not. Since I was used to Paypal from my days on eBay and I signed up for their Website Payment Pro service and used a shopping card that was intergrated with Paypal. It took me well over a week to configure the shopping cart for my use but when I was done adding the html code to each and every charm I had an online webstore. I notified all of my former eBay customers that we had opened out store and waited for the orders to rush in. And waited. And waited.

Ok, now what? I had never heard of SEO, keywords, optimization, css style sheets or anything else a successful online business needs to know.. So I researched again. I read everything I could find -

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Electronic commerce19 September 2011

Ecommerce or e-comm. refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.

Adding E-commerce encompasses so much more than a variety of templates and colors that attempt to match the look and feel of your current website. A few text rollover effects, animated graphics, brief descriptions, thumbnails and photos of the products really only provide you with an online catalog. Such issues as user interfaces, marketing, branding, merchandising, navigation systems, website architecture and data flow is of prime consideration in establishing a successful Internet presence.

E-Commerce is all about transforming your key business processes with Internet technologies. For it to be effective, E-Commerce must be totally integrated into every area of your business. It's everything you need to sell your own products or resell a catalog of products direct from your web site. It can also be everything you need to connect employees, partners, suppliers, resellers, buyers, and others so that you can do business more efficiently via the Internet. Part of the reason that ecommerce has been so successful is that it minimizes human contact. E-commerce are becoming very popular these days, all sales are done directly.

Electronic commerce that takes place between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants. Electronic commerce that takes place between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com.

The term electronic commerce (commonly known as e-shopping, E-commerce or ecommerce) meant the process of execution of commercial transactions electronically with the help of the leading technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) which gave an opportunity for users to exchange business information. E-commerce are becoming very popular these days, all sales are done directly. The ability to use these technologies appeared in the late 1970s and allowed business companies and organizations to send commercial documentation electronically.

Julie is an avid entrepreneur and pushes for online business in the Washington. She has a team of Virtual Personal Assistants who help her run her website as well as manage her many blogs that she runs. If you're interested in Julie's business world or you would like to find out more on how her Virtual Personal Assistant works, visit her website Virtual Personal Assistant

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