How do e business work

Electronic interchange of documents EDI is providing the suitable base for the swift and efficient interchange of information between information systems without errors. When using standard messages or documents respectively is the electronic interchange enabling also the use of common language between information systems of different organizations wherever in the world.

Buyer may submit to the supplier also other electronic documents for the management of the supply chain and production:. Supplier may submit to the buyer the electronic documents for goods and logistics management:.

At all these electronic documents normally the internationally agreed upon standard format of electronic messages is being used, thus enabling the communication between any buyer and supplier all over the world.

About Company Partners Contacts News. User login Panteon. Fields of solutions. Products and services. Examples of solutions. How does e-business work? Advantages of e-business. How to start with e-business? Will you be selling products or services? If you're selling products, are they physical or digital? Where will you source your products? Along these lines, you'll also want to think about the type of business model you want to employ — will you offer single products, packages, subscriptions, or something else?

Additionally, you'll want to think on a broader scale during this process as well: How will you get your products or services to your customers?

What will your startup costs look like? Are there legal or other regulations on your product or service that you need to keep in mind? These lines of questioning, among others, will be integral to the beginning of your business and will help you start to create and write your business plan. This process will give you a better sense of your specific goals and how you're going to reach them.

Particularly in the e-commerce space, an important part of this step is finding your niche. Although the growth of the e-commerce industry is a great benefit for those looking to learn how to start an e-commerce business, it also means more competition.

You'll want to perform competitor research and find a space where you think you can establish your brand and find success in selling products and services. Once you've solidified the plan for your e-commerce business, the next step is to choose a name. Like any other business, you'll want to choose a name that's unique, but also that clearly indicates what your business is or does.

You'll likely want to consult your local secretary of state's website, as well as the U. Patent and Trademark Office to ensure that you're not choosing a business name that's already claimed by another company. Although you won't want to invest too much time on a website quite yet, it will be worthwhile to check to see if your potential business domain name is available. If your domain name is currently being used, you may consider a different business name, or a different structure, such as "yourbusinessname.

Next, choose your business's legal structure. The business entity type you pick will have important legal and financial implications for your e-commerce operation. Generally, you'll choose to create a sole proprietorship, general partnership, LLC, or corporation. There are benefits and drawbacks to each of these entity types, so you may decide to consult an attorney or another legal professional for advice on the best option for your business.

If you choose to start a sole proprietorship or general partnership, you won't actually have to register in the state where you're operating. Instead, your business will be associated legally under your individual name, meaning if you want to operate under the name you've chosen, you'll need to need to file a DBA or "doing business as" application with your local government. The industry standard for bookkeeping and other services. Next, you'll want to apply for an EIN, or employer identification number, for your e-commerce business.

Although not all business entity types are required to have an EIN, this nine-digit number can be useful to help you separate your personal and business finances. Since you're learning how to start an e-commerce business, you'll very likely want to apply for this business tax ID online, and once you do, you'll receive your number instantly.

Source: IRS. After you've applied for your EIN, you'll now want to obtain any business licenses or permits needed to operate legally within your city and state. As we mentioned above, if you've established your e-commerce business as a sole proprietorship or general partnership, you don't actually need to register your business with the state — unless you're filing a DBA to legally operate under a specific business name.

For the other business entity types, however, you will need to register your business with your state and receive a general operating license. Depending on where your business is located, you may also need to acquire a local operating license as well. Generally, because most e-commerce businesses are home-based, they do not require as many business licenses and permits as brick-and-mortar stores.

However, you'll want to determine what the specific requirements are in your area — you can usually find this information online via your state or local government website. For example, most locations require that home-based business owners receive a home occupation permit to legally operate.

This type of permit simply shows that by operating your business out of your home, you aren't adding traffic, noise, or problematic conditions to your location. Some other types of business licenses and permits that you may need include:. Professional and trade licenses for certain industries. Health, safety, and environmental permits. At this point, you've completed the paperwork required to register and legally start your e-commerce business.

In this way, the majority of our steps thus far have mirrored the process of starting a brick-and-mortar business. Now, however, instead of searching for a location and preparing to set up up your physical store, you'll start creating your website and online store. Like a physical storefront, this website will be the face of your business — it's what your customers will see first and what they'll use to browse and purchases your products or services.

With this in mind, creating your website will be one of the most important parts of starting your e-commerce business. You'll want to consider a few different points as you develop your online storefront:.

First, you'll want to think about your domain name, as we mentioned above. You'll want your domain name to at least closely match your business name. Along these lines, and perhaps your most significant decision will be choosing an e-commerce platform. Whether an all-in-one software, like Shopify, or an open-source platform, like Magento, your e-commerce platform will be the base you use to build and develop your online store.

Most e-commerce platforms not only allow you to create and launch your online store, but also customize your design, add your domain or purchase one , manage inventory, take and ship orders, receive payment, and more. Although there are hundreds of these platforms available on the market, you might consider any of the following popular solutions for starting your e-commerce business:.

Perhaps the most well-known and popular e-commerce software out there, Shopify offers an all-inclusive, user-friendly solution with a variety of add-ons. If you already have started a WordPress site, or are familiar with the platform, you can download WooCommerce to start selling on your WordPress site.

This plug-in is open-source, free to download and includes the full range of e-commerce features. The best example is Google Shopping , which is essentially a product search engine. This is another way to improve the visibility of your products and earn more awareness of your brand. Shopping feeds should allow you to quickly add your products while retaining all their attached information, such as pricing, star ratings, images, "in stock" status, and more.

For best results they should update automatically to ensure that all the most current information from your website is properly reflected on the other sales channel. If you've read any articles about SEO, you've probably seen the phrase "content is king. Since frequent updates help it rank better, content marketing is best done through a blog on which you'll make regular posts containing useful content that people will want to read.

This serves multiple purposes. It provides the type of helpful results that search engines prioritize, it gives you an opportunity to use keywords relating to your products, and it helps establish your brand as a knowledgeable authority in your industry. The better the content you write, the more visitors will appreciate it, whether those visitors are humans or search engine robots. It doesn't matter what industry you're in: as long as you have something to say, you'll have something to write.

News and updates about your business or industry are great, and help keep your blog fresh and relevant, but don't focus on them exclusively — once they're out of date, they become less useful and their importance falls. This is why your blog also needs evergreen content, which means it's always relevant no matter how old the article is.

How-to articles, in-depth product breakdowns, and other informative topics will remain useful, allowing them to slowly climb in rank as they accumulate pageviews and backlinks. Make small updates to old articles from time to time and continue to nurture them, and the long-term rewards can position your brand as a leader.

Since time immemorial, businesses have attracted new customers by throwing a big sale. Customers always feel an element of risk when buying from an unfamiliar business, but reduced sale pricing cuts this risk down somewhat — if they turn out to dislike your product, at least they made a smaller investment to buy it.

Promotions are also likely to earn you repeat customers, especially if they've had their eye on a certain product and are waiting for a sale. You have several options — create discounts on single products or whole categories, or have a sitewide sale event. Or, send coupons out to your customers via email or social media. Hold short-term events like daily deals, and social events like group deals in which a minimum number of purchases must be made to activate the discount.

This latter type of sale can help your store go viral, as customers share information about the group deal in the hopes that their friends will participate. During the holidays, promotional events are pretty much required. Customers expect deep discounts on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, and other important sales dates during that time of the year. Depending on what you sell, you could also benefit from promotions during other holidays, like Valentine's Day.

Email marketing is one of the most reliable methods available. It involves sending a regularly-timed newsletter to people who have chosen to subscribe, whether or not they've made a purchase from you yet. The most successful newsletters contain useful information or entertain the reader, rather than pure sales language. They're also a prime opportunity to include coupons to encourage your subscribers to make a purchase. For past customers, you can tailor the newsletters to match the interests they've shown you — for example, the coupon you include could apply to a product that relates to their previous purchase.

Splitting up your newsletter audience is called "segmenting" and allows you to provide personalized content. The most powerful eCommerce platforms make this process nearly automatic by allowing you to use your customer records when setting up your newsletter lists, whether you use a built-in newsletter creator or an outside service like MailChimp. Shift4Shop's Newsletters and Customer Groups tools are great examples of these kinds of features.

Partnerships involve outreach from your business to other businesses or media that may be interested in showcasing your brand or products, or working together in another way. One example is to trade guest blog posts, which will expose both of you to an entirely new audience.

Affiliate marketing is a useful tool that allows others to promote and sell your products in return for a commission. Bloggers, review websites, and other online media are more likely to write about your products if they can earn a commission on any sales of your product that result from their website. This comprises a type of advertising that you don't need to pay for until it becomes successful — rather than paying up front for an ad that may not bring results, you pay the affiliate their commission after the sale has already been made.

In order to serve its purpose, an eCommerce website needs to have several processes in place that enable the eCommerce business model to work. These consist of the necessary features for making a transaction online. One of the hallmarks of eCommerce is the speed and convenience with which a customer can buy something. Part of that process is the ability to enter payment information onto your website, rather than the older methods of mailing in a form or ordering over the phone although phone orders are still viable for some businesses.

Today, the process has become even faster with the advent of one-click checkout, which uses saved customer data to prevent the need to enter it all over again. Online payment gateways are the technology that makes this possible. A payment gateway authorizes a credit card or other transaction near-instantaneously. Other than this basic functionality, no two payment gateways are exactly the same.

Pricing, policies, and other factors come into play, so it's important to choose the right payment gateway for your business. Not all payment gateways simply deal with credit cards, either. One-click checkout and other fast-tracked checkout systems are made possible through digital wallets in which customers store their data for later use.

These can also include an extra degree of security and peace of mind. Always choose your payment gateways based on the needs of your customers and your business. When choosing an eCommerce platform, make sure it integrates with the payment gateways you want to use.

Shift4Shop is automatically integrated with Shift4 Payments, so you won't need to hunt for a payment gateway right away to get your business running. Additionally, Shift4Shop integrates with more alternative payment methods than any other eCommerce platform in the industry, giving you more options for taking payment.

Shipping is the lifeblood of eCommerce. After all, if there were no way to receive products purchased over a website, then shopping online wouldn't be possible except for digital downloads. Shipping features in an eCommerce platform make it much easier for you to get customers' purchases on their way. Perhaps most importantly, you can pull the shipping rates directly to your website so the customer can see their shipping costs change in real time as they update their order.

This prevents the upsetting surprise at checkout when a customer is unaware of shipping charges until they appear in the order total. This unexpected increase in the price of an order is the number 1 reason for cart abandonment. As your business grows and you make more sales, you'll find every time-saving measure to be valuable. Shipping integrations can also include the ability to print pre-filled labels directly from your dashboard, which saves you the trouble of writing it out and almost eliminates the chance for errors when adding the customer's address to a package.

Along with labels, you can also obtain tracking numbers to provide to the customer to ease their minds as they wait for their purchase to arrive. Shipping status notifications are also greatly appreciated by customers, especially the "Out for Delivery" and "Delivered" notifications.

The former tells the customer that their package is now on the last leg of its journey, on the truck that will make the final delivery. When they receive the "Delivered" notification, they know to look for their package immediately. The "Delivered" notification also helps protect you in customer disputes in which the buyer claims they never received the package.

Credit card and other payment providers will often dismiss a chargeback claim if the business can prove delivery. It's crucial to charge your customers the right amount of sales tax on every purchase. You'll need to remit all your sales tax every year, so if you haven't been collecting it, you'll find yourself needing to make a potentially very large payment right out of your pocket.

This is a nasty surprise at best, and at worst, can present a setback that some small businesses can't recover from. To help prevent this problem and ensure businesses collect the proper sales tax on customer purchases, some eCommerce platforms have automatic tax calculation that lets you set up rates to be applied based on the customer's location. Tax can also be shown in the cart to help prevent another surprise price increase at checkout, similar to the shipping charges.

Security is essential for websites, whether or not they collect any user information. Even the most basic website should be protected from hacking and malware contamination, but in eCommerce, you need to take it a step further. Whenever credit card numbers, customer addresses, or other personal data is being transferred over the internet, it's the website owner's responsibility to ensure that all this data will remain safe.

The most basic level of security is SSL technology. SSL Secure Sockets Layer encrypts all the data that passes between the website's server and the visitors' browsers to protect it from interception by a third party. For eCommerce, you also need PCI compliance, which is a process that ensures your business can protect customer data from breaches and protect your website from hackers. The PCI compliance process is quite intensive, but fortunately, some of the best payment providers and eCommerce platforms have it built in.

Fraud protection is part of online store security, but consists of a different set of features outside the typical security measures outlined above. Generally, eCommerce fraud protection relies on a combination of automatic analysis and actions by the store owner. Orders with characteristics common to fraudulent transactions can be blocked completely or flagged for review.

We briefly mentioned integrations in regards to shipping carriers, but your online store can also integrate with other types of business software to make your operations easier.