Electronic Commerce Software

This report discusses talks about e commerce software solutions. It first identifies the important features of any e commerce software. It also discusses the benefits and challenges e commerce software. Lastly it talks about emerging trends in e commerce software and the growth perspectives. Introduction E-Commerce is the buying and selling of products, services, money, information and entertainment over the computer network between two entities. The popularity of e commerce has increased due to the wider reach of internet. Trading online is cost effective and profitable.

It enables one to sell 24hrs and anywhere in the world. A wider number of customers can be reached in contrast to regular brick and mortar businesses. Moreover the automated e commerce environment provides quick and reliable service to customers which results in greater customer satisfaction. For companies to gain a competitive edge in the e commerce environment, they need e commerce solutions that use revolutionary technology and are more customers oriented. E commerce software is the most critical requirement for e businesses. The software helps in recording and processing order and cash transactions.

The other important components needed are E commerce website, merchant account, secure server connection, shopping cart, catalog display, middleware for application integration

and secure databases. Important features of an E commerce Software Some of the features that all e commerce software must provide are (Neoteric UK): • Inventory management • Payment information • Search engine • Payment options like PayPal • Customer accounts • Shipping options like UPS, FedEx • Gift certificates and discount coupons Customer Benefits The e commerce software solution benefits its customers in various ways.

Firstly it allows direct interaction between the two trading parties enabling them to understand product requirements and getting instant feedback. Secondly it allows businesses to choose from different payment systems like PayPal, credit cards etc. and make payments in their own currency. Also these software solutions have inbuilt search engines that allow customers to easily search and track for products. Moreover the companies can sell their products to sites like eBay which further increases the customer market and thus leads to higher sales.

Some software that allows shoppers to send or receive products on multiple shipping addresses for a single order. (Merkatis Commerce) The shopping cart software allows customers to select multiple products. After the products have been selected, the software automatically calculates the total number of items in the cart and their total cost. The customer usually has an option of adding and removing items from the cart before the final payment is made. Thus a shopping cart provides a friendly interface for the customers that enhance their buying experience.

The gift certificates and discount coupons further increase customer satisfaction (Merkatis Commerce). The data mining tools in the e commerce software allows companies to extract useful information from large databases to identify patterns for analysis. For example e businesses can pull out information from customer profiles to identify and classify them on the basis of different characteristics like age, demographics and spending patterns. This refined information is then used to sell tailored product and services to provide specialized service to customers. (Smith, 2009)