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Ecommerce system today is under constant evolution and the categories of application continue with their expansion. Ecommerce now means consumer based ecommerce with web based stores and auctions forming the core of its business. Ecommerce is also a part of digital products, web content, transaction payments and catalogues presentation and download. Traditional use of ecommerce continues to dominate through B2B commerce, focused advertising and business networks.

Evolution of ecommerce is witnessing the communication channels, social networking sites and Blogs mergers with ecommerce techniques. As technology moves closer to each other as in the case of telecommunications and computing, the growth of industrial sectors will continue and move closer to ecommerce utilization.

Every industrial activity and transaction is linked to computing and ecommerce has become an integral part of the automation strategy. Ecommerce has moved from dedicated system to heterogeneous environments running on multiple devices.

Given the ecommerce growth expectation, the focus returns to security. Success of ecommerce depends on formulating a system wide security network. It needs active involvement of stakeholders, introduction of ciphers, and management of user credentials from protecting user privacy. Introduction of multiple devices have formed a gap in the security and protection factors. A methodology to introduce uniformity in device protection through identification of weak links must be explored. Regulations and usability factors must be extensively studied to ensure a smooth growth and worry free ecommerce transaction environment.

Ecommerce is revolutionizing the market and trade of business. As each technology improves in its offering e-commerce too has spread its reach. Ecommerce 2.0 is likened to web 2.0 and treated as a proactive concept of ecommerce in tune with emerging technologies.

Important clichés of e-commerce in this scenario revolves around viral marketing, social networks and a conversational consumer market. To understand this aspect of e-commerce it is better to explore the functionality of few of them.

E-commerce today depends more on advertising networks. Advertising networks have evolved beyond facilitating sales. It has a significant share in the business industry. Web analytics provide software to analyze information and provide input to convert the visiting prospects into customers.

Youtube is cited as a major social network site where users participate in advertising a product. Amazon is evolving into an e-commerce based online community than an online book store with more user content in the form of reviews, ratings and generation of patterns to invite users to buy associated books and increase sales.

E-Bay is an ecommerce platform promoting customer to customer sales. It is customer participation in ratings and payment processing that drives the business here. It is the fact that clear value emerging from more customer participation in a venture drives E-commerce business today.

Bloggers can be identified as personal and professional bloggers. E-commerce deals more with professional bloggers providing free content. These bloggers generate revenue from paid advertisements. It is the goal of the bloggers that drives business. The goal is to attract attention to have an audience.

Visitors browsing an E-commerce site have few expectations in them. E-commerce sites should concentrate on these major categories to ensure the visitor experience to convert into business for the site. It can broadly classify as customer experience, graphics and web design, business and technical approach.

Customers have become more conscious on the language of the site. Needless to say, if the business is a global business it really pays to have International localization or translation service. It is the ease of browsing the site and clarity in business terms that makes the visitor think of a prospective buy. The next aspect is customer feedback and support. It is important for the ecommerce sites to ensure that they listen to the customer.

First impression is the best impression. E-commerce business should ensure content relevant to the theme of business, well spaced and clutter free graphics and color codes, and faster loading site.

Approach to business is another vital area of concentration. It is better to test the payment processes. Traffic estimation must be done. Alexa.com provides the tool to monitor traffic to the website. Google ranking plays an important factor in visibility and driving traffic to the website. It is better to keep track of the ranking.

Technical aspect is major factor and technology used forms the basis of all the factors discussed. Standard shopping cart software should be a part of the website. Search functionality must be effective and access to the site must be round the clock. Common suggestions include better utilization of core pages, help in decision making, and seamless integration to business and payments go a long way to ensure a successful venture of e-business.

E-commerce development has forced innovation and focus change in the marketing strategies. Marketing strategies revolve around the customer but information gathering has assumed a different dimension.

Information is gathered on the demographics of the customer to suit the product offering. Behavior and attitudes of the prospects are studied to promote an aggressive marketing strategy. Decisions are analyzed to promote cross sales and up selling of products. It is more focused on generation pf personas and identification of valuable customers from the customer base.

Behavior triggered marketing is a new strategy of marketing 2.0. It is more oriented towards the behavior of the customer in the site. It is based on three important factors – trigger event, marketing act and channel of execution.

When the customer adds items to the cart, the strategy is to trigger an up selling of other items closely related to the item added to the shopping cart. This functionality should be embedded in the site and incorporated into the design and development of the e-commerce website.

E-mails serve as a best marketing medium in case of shopping cart checkout or payment failure or to request for a survey response if the customer does not visit the site for long. Special promotional offers through email for top spending customer encourage the customer to revisit the site for more purchases. Birthday offers and new additions can be promoted to the customer through targeted advertising through emails.

E-business success is attributed to establishment of a long term relationship with customers. Few terms of customer engagement have undergone a change in their application and presentation.

The most important factors to engage a customer are loyalty, word of mouth and cross selling. Factors like personalization of customer experience, identification of innovative users, quality, and engaging customer through graphical, information rich content also play an important role in retention of a customer. Ethical and green practices and effective customer management is the key to efficient customer engagement.

Loyalty has evolved and gone above collection of points. Loyalty in e-commerce requires a reward in the form of discounts or special offers. It is brand building and more of user experience with the brand. Samples and trial offers form the basis of loyalty to provide a distinct advantage for the customer with respect to other users.

Word of mouth has moved from tell a friend concept to social networking. It is a prerequisite for the business to be part of a social space, widget and employ social tools to keep in touch with the consumer base.

Cross selling practices have changed into more interactive sessions. Customers are prompted with more engaging terms and activities to increase the participation and contribution. When the customer purchases apparel, jewelry items are marketed as a look good factor. More strategies in the form of exclusive recommendations, customer related matches, quick additions engage the customer effectively. History of customers’ views of products reminds the customer of his previous interest in the products and provides the customer with a personalized experience.

Ecommerce sites interested in accepting credit cards must have merchant accounts. Merchant accounts are provided by the merchant banks. Transaction settlements move the value of the sale to this account. Banks consider these important factors before creating a merchant account. Business type, possibility of fraud, charges in cases of default is considered before offering a merchant account. It is to be noted that merchant banks benefit 5% through e-commerce sales but the risk of fraud is over 50% of the total sales executed.

Credit card payments are enabled through Payment gateways. Payment gateways are contracts executed by the retailer with the credit card processing organization. These gateways serve as a point of sale system with all the functionalities of a POS integrated in them.

E-commerce website with payment gateway contacts the credit card processing organization. The organization secures the sale by providing authorization from the credit card issuing merchant bank. Authorization is followed by funds transfer into the retailer merchant account. Messages are sent to the merchant and the customer on the sale settlement with relevant information.

Contract with the credit card processing organization provides a bank account, provision for the website to access the payment gateway and security for credit card information input by the customer. Cost of contract involves a startup cost, monthly charges for payment gateway, address verification and statement fees, transaction fee charged per transaction and discount rate applied as a percentage on the transaction.

Charges add up on the cost and reduce profit factor but an ecommerce site has multiple benefits than a brick and mortar business that makes cost an insignificant consideration.

E-commerce success depends on the customer and the customer prospects experience in the web site. Much of the user experience relies on the speed of website access. Major factors to consider in every e-commerce business are space available in the server, and allowance of data transfer. Other factors include support, server uptime and email accounts.

Websites are hosted in the servers. Normal hosting packages offer allocation of space in the server often much more than the requirement. Small business hosting their websites needs utmost 5 to 10 megabytes of space in the server. E-commerce hosting packages offer large server spaces as a part of the package. This space may not serve any purpose unless the website is highly graphic oriented or aimed at hosting animation and multimedia galleries. It is important to note that the server space paid in the hosting package is likely to lie underutilized in the great deals offered.

Allowances of data transfers are similar to server space allocation. This factor determines the amount of data that can be transferred during customer visits or information is requested from the server. Data transfers are high in websites with extensive graphics and flash animations. Such extensive sites utilize less than few gigabytes in the form of data transfers. Huge visitors drive data transfers high but the fact that high traffic is experienced by only few sites is the reality. Data transfer allowances can always be increased in need.

Enterprise level ecommerce sites need a lot more consideration to security, fault tolerance, scalability and content. These factors drive the success of ecommerce site to ensure trouble free smooth online experience to the users.

Security can be divided into two levels of security – Physical security and access control. Security is imposed as packet filter, application gateway and proxy servers. Packet filters is a filtering mechanism to isolate information packets based on user definitions. File transfer protocol (FTP) and Telnet are applications to provide access to the servers. Application gateways form a layer of security for these applications. Proxy servers keep the actual network address hidden from the two way messages by attaching a proxy internet address. It is an important factor to avoid hacking and intrusion.

Web hosting of enterprise ecommerce should ensure that the website is always accessible online. It should also assure transmission and receipt of information without clogging the bandwidth. Physical site should be provided with security to ensure data protection and privacy.

Hosting can be done in many ways. The website can be hosted on an open domain for users to create their websites. It is free hosting where web site is hosted on a shared server and supported by advertising revenues generated by the website by placement of relevant ads by the hosting company.

Shared hosting is similar to free hosting with technical support and email accounts bundled as a package. Website can be hosted on dedicated server with user options of server configuration, security option etc. Server is rented and this hosting pattern is known as dedicated hosting. If the server is owned, a dedicated hosting option is termed as collocated hosting. Hosting of ecommerce sites must be chosen based on need and business nature. Simple ecommerce site with basic presence can opt for shared hosting. If the website has expertise and has high visitor count, a dedicated hosting will suffice the need. An ecommerce pioneer with unique operation and focused marketing should choose collocated hosting.

E-commerce can be defined as a usage of computers to migrate your business online to support business related transactions. Common usage of E-commerce is visible in marketing, order capture and processing, order fulfillment, end to end inventory management and accounting transactions.

E-commerce is a powerful tool for direct marketers. It provides credibility to the transaction makes communication an inexpensive entity and ensures direct contact with the customers. E-commerce cannot be defined as a direct marketing tool as the complete functionality of its reach is yet to hit the customers.

Elements of a website design can be categorized into accessibility, advertising, aesthetics, content, navigation, speed and updates. Various components and plug-ins are available in the market but the usability of the components or plug-ins improves user experience in cases where the component is integrated into the theme of the business. The important factor is the customer and the website must be customer centric.

Extensive advertising and irrelevant advertising is bound to turn away customers. It affects the loading speed, performance of the website. Advertisement should not overpower the content of the website. Relevant minimal advertising serves as a useful tool to improve search engine rankings and visibility of the website.

Aesthetics and content are mutually inclusive factors of a website. Consistent format with a identical look and feel reduces the learning curve of the customer in site navigation. Content presented in consistent format with appropriate information acts as a trigger to convert the user visit to a sale.

Speed is another important factor of consideration. It is affected by two parameters – graphics and server. Overuse of graphic content increases loading time and a judicious approach must be observed in including video, animations in the content. Content update ensures fresh content and an attractive factor for customers to revisit the site.