For small businesses, e-commerce is all the rage. You most likely feel you are not with it if you do not have a website and are not actively hocking your wares off it. But, as with any other manner for carrying on business, an e-commerce site is not the field of dreams. The mere existence of an e-commerce site does not mean you that your business will suddenly take off like a rocket.

So what are you to do? What I tell business clients time and time again, is to take it slow. Pick out a few items and build a simple e-commerce site. Use your experience from this site to collect marketing information and as a test bed for a larger initiative. By starting small, you will reduce the fiscal impact of your mistakes.

A simple recipe for an e-commerce site is:

1. Create the look and feel - You will need someone with solid graphical talents. Never skimp on this as you want to put your best foot forward.

2. Determine how 'inventory' will be managed - You will need to think about whether your e-commerce site will interact with a database containing the inventory. Using such a database will simplify the synchronization of your e-commerce sales and legacy sales mechanisms.

3. Secure communications between your customers and your site - Your website will need support for Secure Socket Layers (SSL). SSL enables the encryption of the communications link between your customer and your website. Most e-commerce customers will refuse to enter payment information, such as credit cards, unless they know the communications link is secure. All of the mainstream web browsers automatically detect the presence of SSL support and provide the user with a visual cue to this effect.

To enable SSL support for your site, you will need to purchase what is known as a site server certificate from a certificate authority. The big players in this market are Verisign (http://www.verisign.com) and Thawte (http://www.thawte.com). There are yearly fees for such certificates.

4. Processing the credit card - If you wish to verify the validity of the credit card number entered or determine the existence of adequate funds for the purchase, your site will need to communicate with an online credit card clearing house. Two big players in this field are Cybercash (http://www.cybercash.com) or Card Service International (http://www.cardservice.com). Implementation of real time credit card authorization from your e-commerce site requires that you obtain a merchant account with a credit card processor and develop the interface between your site and the credit card processor. You will need a programmer type for the latter of the above.

A less costly and simpler alternative to the above is to process credit cards the old fashion way, manually. With manual processing, you are responsible for contacting the customer whenever there is an issue with the card number or available funds. This may or may not work for you. You would not need the merchant account in this case. Your e-commerce site can easily be set up to turn the customer's order into an encrypted email which is sent to you. Once received, you decrypt the email and process the order. The operative software for handling encrypted email is Pretty Good Privacy (http://www.pgp.com).

That is it in a nutshell. It is never easy, but by starting small you should be able to fulfill your e-commerce dreams.

By: T.C. Hazzard
President, Great Works Internet
Published: Profile Magazine, November 1999