How to Setup E-Commerce for Your Online Business

Want to sell a single product, or run a full featured web store? You need to implement e-commerce on your website. Thanks to the technology, you can have your own store running on your website within few clicks.

Let me share all the ways you can implement the e-commerce function to your online business:

Read on!

Embedding a Third Party Store on Your Website

Say you are an affiliate of some sort of company which gives you your very own e-store in a separate web address. All you have to do is to send the visitor to that link and hope they purchase something.

One of my clients had her own website of cosmetic products and virtual makeovers. However her store page was simply linking to an external URL to check out the products. What I did was to embed that whole e-store experience to this store page.

The makeover page is in iframe showing perfectly on site

Now whenever people clicked onto the store, instead of leaving the site they were simply finding all the products in one place. This was done through an iframe.

Just paste this iframe code in your store page in the HTML section or ask your webmaster to put this for you,

<iframe src=”THE SOURCE WEBSITE” width=”600px” height=”800px”></iframe>

You can change the height and width of the iframe window by changing the numbers.

An iframe lets you embed another website on your page. If you are using wordpress, then you won’t be able to use iframe right away.

First you have to install this plugin called inline iframe then activate it.

Then put the code into the store page in HTML editor view.

I recommend you to use WordPress as your preferred web building platform, simply because it is easy and saves hours in creating web pages.

Selling a Single Product on Your Website

This one is simple, all you need to do is to create a buy now button in PayPal and paste the code in your website along with your product details.

If you are using a third party payment processor like 2CheckOut you can create a buy now button from them and put it on your site, more on that later.

For WordPress users please check out this article on how to use PayPal to sell e-goods.

Setting up an Online Shopping Cart

Use this simple and free shopping cart system called Ecwid and have a simple to setup e-commerce store on your website.

Sign up for a free account, integrade on your website and all you have to do is to click a few buttons and add the product info.

For the payment options you can use PayPal to accept payments. However the problem with paypal is that when people want to pay, they have to use their paypal account and balance to pay. And if they want to use credit card, they have to use the card they have previously linked in their account. As an online vendor you must be able to accept major credit cards along with paypal.

I use 2checkout as a payment processor and it accepts all the major credit cards and paypal payments. It is a secure payment processor you can trust.

Dealing with PayPal, I have had my account blocked couple of times with my funds. On the flip side I have user 2CO for years with no trouble.

Once you have a 2CO account just link this with your Ecwid shopping cart and you will be processing credit cards in no time.

To setup your account in 2CheckOut, read this page for instructions. You can also have buy now buttons that will allow you to eliminate the need for adding a third party shopping cart. 2CO has its own shopping area and recurring payments.

So there you go, now you learned how to setup e-commerce on your website using 3 different methods. Go on and start selling online. All the best!

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This article How to Setup E-Commerce for Your Online Business was first published on BlogKori