E-Commerce Applications

An e-commerce application is a type of specialized web application focussed primarily on the generation and collection of revenue.  That can mean selling products online, soliciting online donations for a non-profit, providing a place for customers to pay a bill, and soforth.  Basically any time a customer submits payment over the Internet, it's considered an e-commerce application. 

There are three main approaches to e-commerce: Hosted Storefronts, Hosted Order Pages, and Web Services Payments.

• In a Hosted Store Front, you create an offsite store using a vendor such as Yahoo! Stores.  After signing up, you go to their website to create your store.  You enter in all of your products: their names, descriptions prices etc..  You'll typically then upload pictures of the products.  Then, when one of your customers wants to buy your products or services online, they click a link that you've set up, which takes them off of your site and onto your store's site.  You can usually do some degree of theme design on the store site to make it look like it's integrated with your site.  All of the payment processing is done by the store vendor, who typiclly then subtracts a percentage and deposits the rest into your merchant account.  These take the least technical expertise to setup, are generally the most costly, and are not very integrated with the rest of your site.
  
  
• In a Hosted Order Page or Shopping Cart application, you display your products and services on your site.  Then, when a customer orders one of them, they are taken to an order page hosted by an outside vendor such as PayPal for checkout.  The user has the option of checking out right then, or continuing to shop.  All the checkout services are provided by the outside vendor, who then typically takes a percentage and deposits the rest into your account.  What's different about this approach to the hosted store front is that you display your products on your own site, in your own format, and when a customer orders something, you just pass along the order information to the hosted order page.  After the user pays, they are taken back to your site.
  
  
• With Web Services Payments, the customer stays on your site the entire time.  You display your products, you manage the look and feel of the store, and you collect the customers payment information.  Then, when a customer places an order, your site transmits payment information over a secured connection to a Payment Gateway, which processes the transaction and returns an Accepted or Declined response to your website.  Your website then displays the appropriate response to the customer, and the money is automatically deposited into your account.   Web Services payments are the most integrated, since the customer never leaves your site, the most flexible, and require the greatest amount of technical expertise to set up. 

For examples of E-Commerce applications we have developed, please follow the links below.