What is an e-Commerce?

e-Commerce is doing business online and electronically. e-Commerce is about buying and selling products and services on the Internet. The sellers are individuals, small businesses or large corporations. The buyers are consumers or businesses. Payment can be made by credit or debit card, money order, cash, check, services or trade.

Why an Online Store?

Nowadays everybody is busy with work and family, they get less time to move out for shopping. Many international brands have come up with e-Commerce stores online. It makes life easier by buying products online. Attractive offers, discounts, best deals, etc are all a part of the bouquet that online stores offer.

The products purchased from the stores online, get delivered in 24 hours to 48 hours within the same city or 5 to 7 days in other cities. The users get an option to pay by cards credit or debit or even cash at the time of delivery. This guarantees that they only give out money once they have received the product.

There are Open Source e-Commerce platforms like Magento, osCommerce, OpenCart, Spree Commerce, VirtueMart, etc.

The e-Commerce store online can be developed using Cake Php or Php Frameworks.

To develop a e-Commerce website, would like to share the feature list :

1. Attractive Home Page : With a image slider offering best deals and discounts.

2. Main menu : With listing of categories and sub categories

3. Category Page : Displaying product in a grid, category wise.

4. Product detail : Product displayed with features and cost to add to cart.

5. Normal Layered Navigation filter : User friendly search for products.

6. User login : Easy login registration form, limited details for the user to enter.

7. Wish list : User having an option to create a wish list for his next purchase on availability of product.

8. Shopping Cart: Helps the user to check everything on a page, to confirm what products he has selected.

9. Display of listing : Product listing page with grid view, add to cart and availability of product.

10. Search : Advance search category, product name , Sub category, etc

11. Product Comparison : Comparison of products with products of same type, features and cost.

12. Recent viewed : This feature help user, to find what he viewed earlier.

13. Blog : Helps the website to have good Google indexing and website ranking having more content with keywords used for effective search. This ensures that there is high traffic in your store, meaning more sales.

14. Payment gateway Integration : Credit card acceptance through Paypal , Authorize.net, etc.

15. Checkout : User to check what all they have selected to buy and make the payment.

16. Refer a friend : This helps the website to have more users, by giving some attractive offers or points to the existing users.

17. Coupon : User will earn points on every purchase, which are of a certain value. These can be redeemed at a later stage.

18. Social integration : This is a social share feature for publicizing the activities on the website through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.