Ecommerce and Selling Online

The idea of selling products or services directly online can seem daunting to begin with... how do you take payments? how do you manage orders? how do shopping carts work? - it can all be very confusing which is why we have provided the following ecommerce guide to try to simply the whole process into none technical terms.

How does Ecommerce work?

At it's most basic level, ecommerce is the process of selling goods or services through a website without any direct physical interactions with the customer.

The key processes involved are shown in the diagram below:

Ecommerce Website

This provides the means for visitors to search for products that they wish to purchase. A good ecommerce website will break down the products clearly into simple categories and make the entire purchasing process as simple and straight forward as possible.

The Shopping Cart

This is purely a temporary store of products while further shopping is done working in much the same way as a shopping basket/trolley/cart in the real world as the name suggests.

Items can be added, modified and removed from the shopping cart as required.

Checkout and Payment

This is the stage at which the customer confirms their purchases and pays for their products. Payment can be taken directly on the website or using a payment gateway such as Nochex, Paypal or Sagepay