E-commerce
Collecting and Recording Customer Orders
After attracting the visitors to your website, the next step is to collect and record orders. There are several methods in use by web merchants:
Printable Order Forms
The simplest method and the least popular with your visitors is to provide a printable order form. This solution is the easiest to implement for the merchant; however, this method is not effective as the customer might misplace the form or change their decision to purchase. If you were a customer, would you really want to print a form, fill it out, hunt for a stamp and mail it?
Toll-Free Telephone
The next easiest solution and more palatable to your visitors is to offer a toll-free telephone number. This method is even more successful when combined with accepting COD orders. As the internet is never closed you must ensure that orders can be taken around the clock.
Shopping Carts
The hardest solution to implement and the best for closing the sale is an electronic shopping cart. Many web hosting services offer free use of a shopping cart script as an inducement to use their services. Shopping carts vary in capabilities and ease of use.
Minimum Shopping Cart Features
There are a few key features that should be considered a bottom line when choosing a shopping cart.
Easily add, modify, and delete items
Customize the interface to match your web site
Calculate taxes and shipping charges
Validate credit cards
E-mail notification of orders
Desirable Shopping Cart Features
You should strongly consider the following extra features when choosing your shopping cart.
Upload product database or spreadsheet files
Images of products
Real-time credit card clearing and processing
Customer order status tracking
Locating a Shopping Cart
Per Step 2: Hosting the Content, the best solution is to select or move to a hosting service with a built-in shopping cart. Then, just follow the hosting service's directions for loading your cart.
Commonly used shopping carts with large user bases include:
Adding a custom shopping cart is not for the faint hearted. You can download and modify one of the dozens of pre-written shopping cart scripts from sites, such as, CGI Resources. While not extremely difficult, it is very time consuming to install and test a shopping cart script.
An easier solution for a non-cart enabled website is to use a third party shopping cart such as CCNow or iFulfill. These companies host your shopping cart on their servers. You merely add scraps of HTML to your webpages to connect each product to the shopping cart. Most third party shopping carts allow only the sale of hard goods.
Testing the Cart
After configuring and loading the cart with your inventory, you should test the cart. Pretend that you are a customer and try to purchase several items. Verify that the cart is correctly tracking the order and that all applicable charges are correctly added.
If your shopping cart validates credit cards, you will need to use your own credit card information or a credit card test number. Validating a credit card only verifies that the credit card number was entered correctly by using a check sum formula. The following are common credit card test numbers.
Do NOT attempt to use these numbers for purchases.
Improper use of these numbers may constitute credit card fraud and may be a felony.
Visa 4111111111111111
MasterCard 5555555555554444
Discover 6011111111111117