How to build an eCommerce Business models?

   

        eCommerce plays an important role in strengthening the relationship and improving the efficiency of our dealings with suppliers and other key trading partners. Investopedia defines as a business model or segment of a large business that enables the firm or individual to conduct business over the network. It operates all four major market segments that includes B2B, B2C, C2B, or C2C (marketplace). From the books to plane tickets, almost any product and services can be offered by eCommerce.  The concept of supply chain management revolves around having the right product in the right place at the right time and the key aspects of supply chain management include,
      * the ability of businesses to exchange information on stock levels
      * fulfill the orders more quickly
      * Minimize excess inventory
      * Use a network infrastructure to ensure good response time and speed
      * Improve customer service
        Having an eCommerce store is great and what you do is really counts. It is to see how you can fit your eCommerce store into your existing business. So, if you have a high street store, then you are in the perfect position to take full advantage of eCommerce. The eCommerce store gives your customers to order the products online which will increase your turnover and give you a much bigger potential audience. The eCommerce store need to synchronize with your physical store so that the inventory is updated when the products are bought in-store or online. There is an electronic point of sale(EPOS) to automatically update the stock without any of your work. This can be a small scale business model and don't need to run the business on a massive scale from day one. You need to identify the type of product you sell or making own products and create a store website needs an small amount of investment in inventory. You can use social media channels or eBay store to increase the sales and use the blog for content marketing. If you are a blogger or marketer, you might have an audience to your existing business and promoting your email list and can sell your products. It is to identify the type or product that matches your niche and choosing an eCommerce platform to suit your store. You can sell digital products like ebooks, and software through the eCommerce store and start using things like apps, and plugins to sell your books in more inventive ways. Embed your e-commerce store into a Facebook page for more direct monetization of social media efforts. For ex, the clothing resale is a simple and easy business model. Here, you are buying stock and reselling it a little more. you may buy the 100 shirts for $500($5 each) and sell for $10 each that gives you $500 profit. It is called keystone pricing. Now, you may choose to keep $200 and reinvest $300 so that you can order $800 next time for $1600 turnover.

Building an eCommerce Store: If the website is confusing, unattractive, then the client has myriad choices when it comes to online shopping. He will choose to purchase somewhere else or he will never return to your website. The end objective of our eCommerce store is to sell more items. So, you need to think carefully about the layout and design your site. There is many considerations and design choices that will encourage sales. If you want to sell the broadest range of people, you need to ensure your site looks official and trustworthy. It needs a professional-looking design and brand with a high-quality logo. You can improve the UX of the website by the following rules,
 1. Use Easy Navigation - It is important to design if the user finds something specific on your website. So, finding the right category is the first step. Categories should reflect the user's mental model - Where they expect to find the item. It should be accessible from the main navigation. The readability decreases if there are many categories. Try to create a couple of main categories and rest as subcategories. The products are categorized as,
     * If the product fits in different categories, place it in each category which makes items easier to find
    * Name of the category should reflect the user's thinking and not the business or technology thinking
    * Make sure the categories are intuitive and easy navigation before going to live

 2. Use the Search Bars - People uses the search bar for what they are looking for - often specific to the product name. Users who utilize the search are often in the late stage of buying mode when they have gathered all of the information they deem necessary and made a decision on which product to buy. So, Place a search bar in the visible place of the website and accessible from every subpage. Follow these rules when designing the search bars like,
   * Users can make mistakes, so support the typos in search queries
   * Display the similar or suggested products when nothing matches the query
   * if possible, search results dynamically

 3. Include the Filters in Searches - Filters are useful when you have hundreds of products in the same category. In order to design the product, you need to understand how users are searching for your products. For ex, the price range filter is important for the customers. When designing a filter, it is important to consider their order and input method. Always select the input method that allows the fastest use depending on the data type and user's context. With dynamic sorting, the results immediately change after a user chooses a filter. With user-command sorting, the user has to confirm the choice, and the results will be shown.

 4. Use the Product lists to display necessary Information - Product lists allow the user to make the decision on which product they need to view. In order to support this process, you need to display the information that helps them to find what they are looking for more quickly. For ex, the price, color variations, size, model type etc., There is another decision to make is to provide an option to add the product to the cart. If the user wants to buy the item without going into more detail, then add an option to quickly add the product to the basket so that the user doesn't need an additional step every time else if the product requires additional properties like color, size of shirt then the user needs to go the product page and update the details.

 5. Design the Easy-to-Scan Product Pages - Product pages should have the critical information to be visible at first sight and everything else should be easily accessible without crowding. Some users will purchase the product on an overview of the information, while others want to know everything about the product before buying. So, you need to accommodate both types of users on your website. The elements that support good product pages are,
   * high-quality product photos from a different angle
   * Visible product pricing
   * Eye Catching CTA button
   * Overview of the Product
Also, you need to think about the color scheme and palette on eCommerce website design. Different colors have different effects on your customers. for ex, the red and orange colors have slightly impatient and this can be used as your advantage. McDonalds store has this color scheme so that people don't comfortable spending a long time eating. It makes the store to accommodate the higher turnover of customers and more profit of the result.

 6. Implement the easy Check-Out Process - The survey shows that people are less likely to buy from the store if they need to set up an account first. In the planning stage of eCommerce project, it is important to understand how the website will be maintained on a day-to-day basis.  Getting the users to the final step of sales is critical. If you want to sell as much as possible, you need to make the process of buying from you should be streamlined and as simple as possible. It should not have any distractions. Breaking the checkout process into smaller steps reduces cognitive load and allows easier progress that makes the process seem faster to complete. It is good to create a buy-with-one-click system. You can use Paypal for the checkout process. This helps more secure and shopping from your site. For the high basket value, it is important to display an order summary at every step because your clients may feel anxious when they pay a lot.  After the order is complete, send an email with an order summary and display it on the website. The order summary should have ordered a product, the amount paid, package arrival date, and delivery address. It is good to allow the user to edit the basket contents for the quantity, link to the product, remove the item from the basket etc.,
            In order to build the application and start selling online, you need third party services. For ex, to accept the payment on the internet, you need to sign up for the Stripe services and special API keys. Stripe is the current standard for developers accepting the payments in the US. The client-side documentation(https://stripe.com/docs/stripe.js) has javascript library and server-side has node.js documentation (https://stripe.com/docs/api?lang=node) needs to be implemented. Heroku is the cloud application platform that was acquired by salesforce. It simplifies the task of deploying and maintaining cloud infrastructure. If you are using the Node.js server, you can deploy(https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs#set-up) using CLI to the internet.