eCommerce

If you’re selling things online, your shopping cart is the workhorse of your website. There’s a lot going on inside a shopping cart and it all has to come off easily and efficiently. A shopping has two parts: what your customers see, and all the administrative capabilities that you see as the owner of the store, known as the “back-end”.

The Front-End: Customer Service

For the customer, the shopping cart has to be programmed so it knows, for example, that a click on a certain area means she wants more information on the product, while a click on another place means she wants to ‘put’ the product into a ‘place’ where she might later purchase it, known as in the “shopping cart” proper. All your products should have pictures, descriptions, prices, perhaps colours and sizes and options to view the products in more detail. When your customer wants to “checkout”, your shopping cart totals up all the items in the shopping cart, asks for customer’s name and shipping address, and then adds in any taxes and shipping costs, depending on where they live. Finally the shopping cart collects the customer’s credit card information. When the customer confirms his order, the shopping cart saves all the information in your database and then sends all the data to a credit card processing company of your choice (such as Moneris or Global Payments) who, in turn, processes the data securely and sends it on to the relevant credit card companies and banks for billing the customer and paying, you, the merchant for the purchased products. That’s a lot of steps, and it all has to come off perfectly and easily for customer.

The Back-End: Administratin and Marketing

On the back-end, you, the merchant, need to be able to view and manipulate all the data your shopping cart has recorded in an easy and organized way. You’ll have all your customer’s information in a table so you can ship out your products. You’ll be able to see what who bought when and see your inventory levels. With this information you can send out newsletters to your customers, keep track of your sales, administrate your prices, shipping, taxes, discounts and add or delete products with all their information and images.

Get the eCommerce Solution That’s Perfect for You

Fusion Studios has been working with e-Commerce right from the beginning, designing shopping carts for every kind of business, and we can also custom design for any special products you might have thought up. So call or drop by anytime and see how easy making money on the web can be.