An ecommerce suite enables businesses to sell products online and includes features such as inventory management, order processing, card processing, and accounting. The virtual shopping cart system allows customers to add products and check out easily. The suite can also track inventory levels and automate reordering. Accounting functions may also be included.
An ecommerce suite is a package of services and software designed to enable a business to sell its products online. Exactly what’s included can vary wildly from package to package. Some common features of an ecommerce suite include inventory management, order picking, card processing, and accounting.
The most basic element of an ecommerce suite is the ability to process orders. This is most commonly done through a virtual shopping cart. It is a system that allows the website visitor to search in a catalog of products and select the ones they want to buy. The shopping cart system means that a customer can add a product to their ‘cart’, continue looking at other products, and then ‘check out’ when they are done searching. Using the shopping cart will mean that when they check out, everything they wanted to buy is already listed on the order form. This avoids the risk of customers looking at the site and forgetting some of the items they had previously found and decided they wanted to buy.
Card processing is another key component of an ecommerce suite. In an ideal setup, the retailer will not have access to the customer’s card details at any stage. This can reduce their possible liability should your card details be misused. The card processing service usually has two elements: collecting card details on the site securely and managing the payment process itself. An ecommerce package may only collect details and leave payment processing to a financial institution, although many packages include both services.
Inventory collection is another useful benefit of a complete ecommerce package. By tracking orders and stock levels, the system can alert a retailer when stock needs to be reordered. Where a retailer also has a physical store, it may be possible to integrate the e-commerce system with their automated inventory system, meaning they can track whether an item is sold online or in person. With some systems it is even possible to set up automatic reordering from a supplier.
A fully automated ecommerce suite might even be able to perform some accounting functions. A more common setup is for the suite to simply produce detailed figures, such as totals for overall sales and individual product lines, or sales tax breakdowns that can vary depending on the customer’s location. A high-end e-commerce package will usually be able to produce these figures in a format that means the data can be easily transferred into a company’s accounting software and merged with the details of sales in brick-and-mortar stores.
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