Confidentiality is very important for conducting an internet business; the reason being that the customers provide you with such information that nobody else should have access to. If your website processes sensitive information such as credit card information, ensuring your customer’s confidentiality becomes very important. Addresses and passwords of customers should be protected otherwise the customers may fall victim to identity theft.

Integrity is also very essential for conducting an internet business. Integrity refers to storing the information properly. It means that data cannot be modified in undetectable manner. The third aspect of internet security is availability. Availability means that information must be available when it is needed.

Ensuring security of online transactions at your website is important to protect data from spammers and hackers. Firewalls, antiviruses programs and anti spy ware programs serve this purpose fully well. Internet crimes are becoming more and more common these days. Online transactions are faced with multiple threats. Therefore efficient measures must be taken in order to ensure the security of such transactions. With the passage of time, hackers continue to improve their skills. In last few years stories about computer viruses, spy ware, hackers, and internet frauds have become more and more commonplace in the news.  Therefore adequate measures must be taken for internet security in order to tackle the hackers.

Most of the companies are already using Facebook platform for driving traffic to their sites or attracting customers to their brands and let them recognize the launch of new products. Businesses faced one problem in particular that Facebook is unable to accomplish transaction for those e-commerce sites on its own platform. This issue was resolved by Facebook in form of Payvement Application. Payvment is an application of storefront that directly deals with the transaction issues faced by e-commerce storefronts on Facebook.

This new application has brought revolution to Facebook storefronts and retailers were waiting for such applications so that they can transact directly with the clients. Storefronts owner can use this application and accept money from customers via PayPal account or through credit cards sanctioned via PayPal. I know mostly people do not take Facebook seriously for business purpose but there are several users who prefer to shop online and mostly users are registered on Facebook. There are several others e-commerce applications but Payvment is only application that allows Facebook users to shop from several online retailers and add all items in shopping cart, without leaving Facebook.

Payvment has not all leisure offers for customers only, it allows retailers to sign up for this application and agree to offer discount to everyone who become “Fan” of the retailer on Facebook. You must be thinking that how retailers become agree to offer discount to their page fans? It happens because of the notifications system of Facebook, once the user becomes fan of page, notification is sent to his all friends by Facebook and people become more attracted towards the specific storefront and it is a clever tactic for the retailers that save their money to be spent on advertising.

1. Payment Options

Whenever you go shopping online, you would have often come across websites that don’t accept your payment option. That not only leads to frustration but you also tend to avoid that site without thinking that the site may have included the payment you option you opted last time. Merchants also loose customers because of unavailability of most used payment options. Even if your gateway service provider does not support a particular rare payment option, even then there are chances that some of the customers might be using those unpopular payment methods, which would eventually result into some revenue & profit leakages.

2. Circumventing frauds & providing advanced security features

Website attacks have always been on the rise and even a lot of bigger names have met with stiffer hacking attempts that resulted into loss of a lot of customers and made your site infamous for payment security. You should never ever compromise on the quality of security being provided by your web host. Good web hosts are PCI compliant and also give the guarantee of your payments being secured. Usually payment checkout pages with secure gateways also open with an https:// prefix, further securing your transaction details through the encryption provided. One key thing that really adds to the security of your transactions is that good web hosts always save your transactional details on their own secure servers rather then you in your browser cache or other temporary folder of your operating system which prevents any other software from getting your credit card or other important information without your consent.

3. Smooth sailing & pleasant memories

It is important to include only required information especially on the checkout pages. This will reduce extra burden on customer’s memory and will help him make decisions more easily. This will also ensure a shorter transaction time removing the unwanted hassle & wrestle the customers usually have to go through in online transaction processes. Feedback links should be on every page and customer service should be prompt. Customers online usually don’t have any kind of direct contact with the ecommerce site and it would be handy if you provide live chat facility as that will also have a significant impact on the customer conversion ratio.

Advantages

The first major advantage is improvement in the conversion rate of the customers who come to your site. It is a proven fact that more page checkouts not only take a lot of time and customers are mostly in a hurry. Secondly and most importantly they take away the confidence from the customer that it is safe to use this website. The more a website takes time to process the data, the worse it gets for the customer confidence.

As the new technologies like AJAX have been introduced, we can now built pages that are extremely easy to use. One page checkout would enhance the user experience which would result into repeat purchase. And repeat purchase is a very important asset for any e-commerce website

The time spent by users on an e-commerce is also reduced, which reduces the load on the servers for simultaneous users and also improves the time spent to transaction ratio in monetary terms. This is a winning situation for the customers, e-commerce entrepreneurs and their web hosts.

Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage of all is that one page checkouts won’t work without JavaScript and AJAX. Usually JavaScript has to be enabled by the user otherwise the page won’t be displayable. This creates a huge problem for the website owner who can’t then do anything other then to provide an alternate option of a long check out.

This may also lead some customers to confusion as many customers are used to lengthy checkouts which lets them feel safe that they are going through process and there won’t be any problem in that. In this case they might think of it as a scam or something to trick them into.

Hosting VS shelving

When an e-commerce website is set, the e-commerce store owner has to buy a domain name, a web host and a software package for its e-commerce activities. The cost of all these items runs from just few dollars to few hundred dollars. On the other hand, when a brick and mortar store owner wants to shelve inventory, it takes a lot of rent, man power, and continuous inventory management. An e-commerce site owner not only reduces costs associated with doing online business but can also attach the inventory tied to its sales, thus reducing the cost of maintaining the inventory other wise.

Marketing

When a retail store is established, one of the regular cost features is the front of the store that has to have a well lit display of the store. This well placed front display billboard not only costs thousands of dollars in making but it also takes a lot of cost in terms of the electricity to light it up in the night and may include the rent to be paid as in case of some regional laws. The board is also sadly located just on the location where it is. Online marketing on the other hand does need a lot less money and more of knowledge. The marketing efforts online are global in nature and attract customers from all over the world.

Processing

Online order processing from the transaction to credit card verification and the inventory updating, everything is done just in a quick succession which makes online e-commerce stores almost automated in terms of maintenance of the different kinds of records. While offline you have to go through all the torturous procedures like tallying vouchers, checking inventory cards, maintaining ledgers, and physical counts.

This is just a glimpse of the major advantages that you would have if you have an online ecommerce store over a usual brick and mortar store. Think about it before just dumping in it without any solid reason to back.

There is no such thing as unlimited. When you will buy an ecommerce host, you will know that once you login to your control panel. The people who get trapped in this unlimited thing later realize that it was unlimited. Unlimited usually means a lot of space but that doesn’t mean that the space offered has no limits.

5. 24/7 service support

The best way to check that is by contacting your host at odd timings. You must contact through all the different modes of communication like phone, email, live chat and any other mode of communication. This will assist in determining the level of customer service support that you should expect from your to be ecommerce web host.

6. Behind free hosting

There is also a free hosting thing luring everyone. First of all never buy a free hosting for ecommerce as that is the last thing you would want to do with your business. Free hosts will use the space of your site for their advertisements and you can’t stop them from doing that. Also with free hosting the servers and level of security provided is also dubious at the best.

7.Refund Policy

Always look for the money back guarantee packages. In this competitive world of ecommerce hosts you never know when you will face unexpected problems. As with money back guarantee you are sure to have your money back within no time. Also ask that if there are any conditions tied to the money back guarantee or that right can be exercised whenever you want in a given time period.

8. Customer reviews & historical precedence

Even you have got this far, if you still need assurance then you should try using customer reviews. Customer reviews play a very vital role in the opinion making. Good customer reviews mean that people already using a service are happy with it while vice versa for the opposite. This last check will further cement your expectations from your ecommerce host. All these activities are very important because if you can’t get hold of the services provided to you, you cannot define a good customer experience for your customers.

In case of ecommerce websites hosting, different countries have different policies. As cloud computing isn’t considered as one of the safest of all options, many IT lawmakers in a lot of countries don’t allow a company to put its ecommerce site on cloud. As on ecommerce websites have a lot of user’s important information stored in them, it becomes difficult to justify as being hosted on a cloud computing host. Some of the other sites that have important data of the government or other important data about a country are also unlikely to put it online. As the security of cloud computing has been under fiery criticism by many, the cloud computing systems is also more prone to hacking attacks.

One of the other major problems with the cloud computing host provides is their stricter policies towards their customers. As the cloud computing host providers usually are much stringent in their policies being followed in letter and spirit, you have to know exactly what their policies really are.

Our purpose here is to discuss the different challenges being faced by still infancy cloud computing so that we can choose the best cloud computing service provider

It is now dependent on the international merchants how they prepare themselves for this big wave. This not only includes product sorting in Chinese language but also other challenges like low shipping costs and prompt delivery to this newly explored customer base. Paypal has been providing its services to many nations. It is one of the safest and fastest modes of transacting online with the different customers who look forward to Paypal for sending or receiving money online. Paypal is an E-bay company which has changed the trends in ecommerce by negating the problems of cross border transactional difficulties. China’s UnionPay has been established in 2002. It is the start of the Chinese bank industry and has also revolutionized the way in which transactions can be done inside as well as outside China. It has an estimated 2.1 billion users. The partnership seems to benefit both of the partners and is also going to generate more jobs and business opportunities.

Earlier there were rumors that the social networking giant Facebook would take a leverage of its 400 million regular users to enter into the online payment business. This notion seems dying away as both Pay pal and Facebook are looking to join hands in tapping the potential of the Facebook users jointly. President of Pay pal was hopeful that the Facebook users will definitely use Pay pal to make payments online. He also mentioned the companies plan to ease the payment mechanism and making it available on handheld devices as well.

The president was also very hopeful that things would improve in 2010 and he mentioned that “Bill Me Later” option hadn’t impacted the Pay pal’s margins much. This seems to be very good news for all the people in different countries that struggle to make purchases online. A lot of people around the world with no Paypal account in their countries are hoping that Pay pal would start providing its ecommerce services in their countries as well.