E-commerce

You’ll want to be positioned to attract budding e-commerce sites. That’s
because consumer spending on the internet will reach $184 billion
by 2004 (according to Forrester Research). And that doesn’t include the
burgeoning business-to-business market. The web’s unlimited shelf
space and rich customer data will afford site owners tremendous opportunities
to sell effectively
Your more sophisticated end-users will want e-commerce capabilities
for their web sites. At Alabanza, we’ve developed our own, called AlaCart.
You may not be in the position to build your own e-commerce software,
but you can buy or license a package. What features should you look for?
Here are some basics:
• Built-in Credit Card Validation
• On-line credit card processing
• Highly customizable “look and feel”
• Unlimited product categories and sub-Categories
• Automatic shipping and handling charges,
customized by the user
• Automatic tax table, completely customizable
• Product search capabilities
• Secure Order Processing
• Online Documentation
Another important part of e-commerce is security. Whenever you process an
order online or handle any sort of private or confidential information, you
need to make sure that you have the necessary security features in place so
your information cannot be intercepted.
We enable clients to do the online processing securely using Apache-SSL,
the highest-grade encryption available. They have to purchase their own
digital certificate from Verisign or Thawte and have us install it. There is no
extra charge for setting up forms for secure transactions.
The last step is credit card processing. The leading company offering a
gateway for online credit card transactions is CyberCash. It has been servicing
credit cards securely over the internet since April 1995, and works with
leading financial institutions and payment processing networks.
Processing credit cards online is more complicated than it appears. To do it,
you need to go to your bank and get a merchant account. Your bank will then
get in contact with CyberCash. CyberCash acts as a gateway between the
bank and the web site where the payment is coming from. You do not pay
CyberCash directly, but you need to pay your bank for this service. CyberCash
allows you to actually process orders on-line, as opposed to collecting credit
card information and then processing the transactions manually.