eCommerce is defined as Electronic commerce: the conducting of business communication and transactions over networks and through computers. Specifically, ecommerce is the buying and selling of goods and services, and the transfer of funds, through digital communications. If you have an idea for a store, or have products that you want to sell online you can set up an online store in a few hours, depending on what features you want your store to have.
First you should know what you need in order to run your store. Being a successful store will not be covered here, as that's a topic of setting a niche for yourself, and proper SEO. Topics which are way larger than this tutorial can hold.
An eCommerce software package
A Host
A Domain
A Payment Gateway
A way to ship your products
Products (with images and descriptions)
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate for HTTPS encrypted transactions
eCommerce Software
You can create your own eCommerce software, pay for the many different choices out there, create your own, or use an open source eCommerce application (FREE!) and modify it to your liking.
There are thousands of hosts out there. Just get one with the right plan for you (options, bandwidth, storage). The majority of Open Source products such as those based on osCommerce use PHP and MySQL. Look for a Linux server with PHPMyAdmin, and FTP access for you. Some hosts also offer shared SSL certificates (which I'll talk about more later).
A Domain
You need a URL for people to access your site! Choose something good that represents your site. You can use NameBoy.com and GoDaddy.com (use both) to help you choose a name and to see if its available. Registration is usually just about $10 or $15 unless you want to buy out one that's already owned by someone. Some hosts actually will register for you also.
A Payment Gateway
A payment gateway allows you to accept payment on your online store through the use of Credit Cards (and others if you want). Payment gateways will authenticate the transaction and also transfer the money to your account. Depending on what you want, you can use a service such as PayPal which can take a percentage of your selling, and also a little ontop ($0.30). Or you can pay a monthly fee for a certain number of transactions per month (and more per extra transaction). Choose one that's right for you. Open Source apps have contributions from members of the community for many Payment Gateways which are quick and easy to install. However, if you create your own, it may get a little more difficult depending on which Gateway you choose (known from my own experience).
Shipping
You will need to ship your products to your customers! Choose which method you want. Open Source applications also have many contributions out there for your needs. Note that UPS and FedEx will be more expensive than USPS or Canada Post for smaller items. If you have small products, it would be cheaper to just use regular mail carriers. If you don't have your own products, many manufacturers also have the option of drop shipping for you. By that, I mean, you place an order with the manufacturer, and they'll ship the product to your customer for you. This way you don't have to have inventory.
Products
You need products to sell! Have good pictures of your products and a good description.
SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate verifies secure encryption for your site when transferring data from the client to your server, or from your server to the payment gateway. You should have this when accepting credit card information on your site. Many hosts offer FREE shared SSL certificates. The problem with this is that sometimes a pop up message will appear saying that your domain is not registered with the certificate, or it will redirect the customer's browser to your hosts URL, something that doesn't look too professional. You can purchase a private SSL certificate from many companies such as Thawte, Comodo, GoDaddy and Verisign (expensive!). There are many different types of certificates out there ranging from $20 to over $1000. Again, choose the one that's right for you depending how expensive your products are, and how much money is going through your site.
So once you have all of these, you need to combine them all and test! Once your done testing... LAUNCH and make lots of money!
