hi today's lesson is going to be anintroduction to e-commerce what ise-commerce what does ecommerce made upof whether you're extremely familiarwith it and doing e-commerce for severalyears or just looking to maybe create anonline businessthis lesson will just give you a quickinsight into what it means what is whatthings go into building an e-commercesite so we'll take a look here at thefull lifecycle of e-commerce whathappens when someone comes to your sitethey browse products browse aisles orcategories they add products to the cartthey pay for those products that onlinebusiness fulfills that order and shipsthat order on out and this can be doneas you see here through a mobile devicea desktop device through social mediachannels we'll talk a little bit aboutthose as well so first browsing andsearching for products what does thismean and how does that affect you you'regoing to want to look at your sitesearch it's a very key component mostecommerce platforms out there come witha built in site search come withmerchandising capabilities but let'stake a look at the site search this is auser comes to your site they know whatthey want and they enter that productdirectly into that site search it's oneof the most important items of an entiree-commerce website merchandising theability to merchandise your productsthis would be product displays thiswould be promotional information you'rehaving your top products shown first onproduct category pages also when yoursales running those promotions rightdirectly on the homepage to get users toclick on them that's these are ways ofmerchandising your websitecategorization which is known also asinformation architecture this is verysimilar you walk into a grocery storemaybe your meat department you have yourdeli you have your frozen foods aisleyou have your bread aisle same thinggoes for any e-commerce website breakdown your category so if the userdoesn't know what they're looking forand your messaging did not stick out tothem because they're still not surelet them browse your aisles but havingthat code that very clean categorybroken down for them is really importantwe'll have future lessons on what goesinto creating and there's a largestrategy goes into it but you do want tohave your categories or aisles brokendown so products are easy to find foryour users shopping cart this is just asyou know much like a physical storeyou're gonna grab your products andyou're gonna add them to a shopping cartexcept for here it's online or digitalthere's many shopping carts out therethat come with full built-infunctionality for shopping cartcheckouts merchandising productfulfillment all of that kind of stuffthere's a few tears here the lower endis going to be something like a Zen cartor Luca murse something that's veryquick out of the box for free or next tonothing then you're going to have otherplatforms that are monthly fee so if youare looking to get up and running soonerthan later you'll have shopifybigcommerce Volusion and you pay amonthly fee to have that hosted and allof their tools and services included inthat they start probably as low as youknow $30 a month and they go all the wayup to $1,000 a month but we'll talklater about those platforms in anotherlessonMagento this is probably the largestplatform out there I'm in terms ofcommunica munity popularity and justoverall number of businesses on thisplatform and then some of the higher-endor more enterprise level platforms areKibo Demandware and hybrids now ifyou're looking to just get startedyou're not going to even want toconsider some of these just because theprice points are in the thousands andthousands of dollars each year you knowtwenty fifty thousand dollars plus touse their platforms there's a lot thatcomes with it but in terms of startingsmall you're going to want to look atsome of the free or low monthly costplatforms now you get into your checkoutthis is one of the large parts ofe-commerce is the ability to createaccounts to see past orders updatebilling addresses and those kind ofthings also the ability to acceptpayments there's many payment processorsare out there but to connect that toyour website is one of the biggestthings as I mentioned are several thingsthat go into this but if users aren'table to pay for the products onlinethat's not goodso you'll want to look at paypalauthorize.net will have a section ongathering your requirements and to findout which one works best for you lateron shipping information now thatsomeone's purchasing something how arethey paying for shipping or how are theygetting their products this is more of abusiness decision do you want to tie itinto FedEx or UPShow are they paying for do you want topass that cost off to your customer ordo you want to absorb that cost andlower your margin again these are thingswe'll talk in later lessonsI'm tax calculation if we required tocharge a taxhow are you taxing them how is thatbuilt into that shopping cart and mostof these shopping platforms that wementioned in previous slide are going tocome with the ability to easily setthese up and then lastly orderconfirmation so when they do hit submitorder now that goes into anotherthird-party or within the platform tosay okay an order came through now youguys got to fulfill it and here's thatfulfillment process order processingonce that order comes in where does itgo do you have a manual process wheremaybe you just want an email you walk tothe the next room into the stockroom yougrab your product you put it in youpackage it slap some tape on it call upsand say hey I need to send this out slapthe shipping label on it and they comeand get itthat could be or do you want a morestreamlined process when that comes onin it goes right into a warehouse orinventory management system and ashipping label is automatically printedfor it then UPS knows to come get it andit gets shipped out all those things arepossible again we'll talk about some ofthese a little bit deeper in laterlessons RMA this would be on once theuser gets it they might find that it's awrong size or maybe they just don't wantand they want to return itallowing on the easily return it is animportant element of e-commerce and thisis something you'd want to haveintegrated to your site so that processcan easily be sent back to you and thenreturned for a very easy transaction forboth you guys and and the customer andthen lastly connecting your users as Imentioned a full lifecycle of this isallowing them to browse your aisles yoursite on multiple devices desktop mobileand have a very unique experience butall it's very easy to use for them sothey can find your products and checkout with little issues at all and thennow we've talked about other channelsnow how do we broaden our our net tocover and reach more users social mediaPinterest Facebook Instagram suchimportant ways and we'll have sectionson that as welltalk about reward programs and referralsgetting people that have purchased fromyou in the past won't get them to comeback and also to reach out to theirfamily and friends to get them topurchase and incentive Phi then emailmarketing capturing email addresses andusing that as a tool to continue to getusers to come back or people that mightbe an offense offering them some kind ofwhether it's a discount or promotion tosay hey come purchase from us and thenthere's always the paid search marketingthis is probably going to be you knowthe the pricier version of you of it butyou're paying to get users to come toyour site so once you feel that you'veconnected everything you've merchandisedit you have a great user experience youhave your social media and everythingset up then it might be worth doing apaid marketing program to now driveusers to your site and then work atconverting them so we'll go back to thisthis slide here and and talk through thefull life cycle one last time ecommerceis really that you know buying andselling of goods online so the corething the core takeaway here is findthat platform that's going to work bestfor you in one of our next lessons we'regonna talk through determining orresearching what that best platform isfor you and then we'll have othersections about each of the other areasis order order fulfillment thatexpanding your reach through socialmedia paid search and all those kind ofthingswe'll talk about all the payment side ofit but one your your next step that willbe our next lesson is to find out whatis that online shopping cart or platformthat is going to work best for youso hopefully that you have a little bitmore insight into e-commerce and the incommerce world of buying and sellingonline if you have any questions pleasereach out to us support at commercewisely calm please visit our website forcomment scammer Swasey com4more ecommerce tips and and tricks onmanaging and growing your onlinebusiness and we'll talk to you soon
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