Making the step into online commerce is a different story, though, because it is much more technical. Ebusiness sites must be reliable, secure, and easy to use. This goal has been difficult for many large companies to achieve, let alone small ones.
An easy way to get started with online commerce is using a hosted solution. With hosted solutions, the commerce area of your website is provided by a company that specializes in web commerce. This allows you to do what you do best, while relying on them to handle the technical end.
The standout in this category is Yahoo. Yahoo hosts thousands of web stores, and is a trusted name with buyers. For a low monthly price, they will host your store and handle the transactions. They provide the software, the servers, and the tech support to keep everything running. For small businesses getting started in ecommerce, this is an attractive alternative to developing a custom site.
Pricing starts at about $50/month. Yahoo also charges ten cents/month for each item that you list in your store, and a .5% transaction fee. This makes it a very viable option if you want to have a store that has hundreds or even thousands of items.
Here are some of the benefits that you get with a hosted ecommerce site:
- You have no software or hardware to buy.
- There is very little to learn.
- Building the web store is relatively easy process done within a web browser.
- They handle the transactions so that you can focus on business.
While there are other companies that provide similar services, Yahoo is the standout because of their size and brand recognition.
With Yahoo stores, you build your site using a web browser. You add item information and pricing in a web form. When you submit the form, the information is added to Yahoo's databases, and is available as a web page. You can also upload photographs of your products.
You change the way your site looks by editing the site's properties. This allows you to customize things like the color of your pages, the size and color of fonts, and where your logo will appear. You don't have complete flexibility with the look of the pages, like you would if you built everything from scratch. However, their software does allow you enough flexibility to create an attractive site.
Go To Page: 1 2
