E-Commerce Solutions
Are you thinking about implementing
a web-store? Are you wondering how difficult it will be? Are you
wondering how much it will cost? Worry no longer my friend, I am here to
help. Read on.
Nothing
excites me more than e-commerce. It is a passion on mine. My favorite
aspect e-commerce is the ease in which a web store can be created and
published to the web. Many of today's accounting systems offer
e-commerce solutions that include wizards that automatically set up a
ready to use web catalog or web store. All you need to do is enter your
customer and inventory data into your accounting system just like you
normally do; and for there, the e-commerce wizard extracts the
appropriate data and creates the web store in a matter of minutes. Here
is a hypothetical example.
Your
Home, Inc. is a small home furnishings store that uses the ACCPAC
Advantage Series accounting software system. The company has been in
operation for a few years and all of their inventory items are set up in
the system, including pictures of those items. The company decides to
launch a web store and, accordingly, they purchase the ACCPAC eTransact
module at a cost of $300 per month. They install eTransact and start the
application. A wizard pops up and walks the user through a series of
questions. Once the wizard is completed, eTransact reads the current
customer and inventory files and creates and publishes a ready to use
web catalog live on the web. The wizard allows the user to apply one of
60 different themes to the web site. The user can group products
together in specific categories, and specify which products, or which
web product categories, they want displayed on the web catalog. The $300
monthly fee includes web hosting space of an ACCPAC-provided web hosting
server that is already set up and awaiting web store information. The
web store is automatically synchronized to the ACCPAC data files as
well, which means that subtle changes in prices or quantities on hand
made back at the office are automatically displayed on the web store in
seconds. The eTransact product also includes a credit card merchant
account that allows the user to approve and accept web orders online. As
web orders are placed by web shoppers, those orders flow directly into
the ACCPAC accounting system with no human intervention where they can
be processed and fulfilled. This whole process occurs in less than 30
minutes. Similar capabilities are offered by other accounting software
publishers such as Best Software, Peachtree Software, BusinessVision,
Open Systems and others.
Conclusion - Setting up a web
store is easy and inexpensive. To me, this is the best part of
e-commerce, anyone can can get in on it.
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