Ecommerce encompasses all the systems for selling products and/or services that are developed on the Internet. The most common model —and the one we will focus on in this guide— is the online store , which consists of replicating a physical store on your own website, presenting your products or services in categories and including payment gateways to buy or reserve them directly online.
Integrating an online store into your website no longer requires extensive technical knowledge or a lot of resources. In addition, there are very different examples at very different scales. Let's focus on two to see that it is possible to create an online store at very different scales.
a) On the one hand, when creating an e-commerce site, we can think of a website of a certain complexity like Pandora Shop , where practically all the content revolves around sales. On the main page, the priority is the current promotions and the menus are designed to facilitate the shopping experience —with options like “Gift Ideas” or “New Arrivals”—.
In this type of website, if there is additional content such as a blog or a company cayman islands phone number list presentation, it has limited prominence.
b) On the other hand, it is not always mandatory to think on that scale. There is also the option of integrating an e-commerce module into the website you already have as a way of facilitating transactions for your customers. This is the case of the company UR Pirineos –. Its main page focuses on presenting the company, its contact details and the activities it offers.
By simply entering the specific page of each activity and after reading about it, you are offered the possibility of booking it directly with an online purchase. In other words, UR Pirineos has not needed to redesign its entire website and its digital strategy to create an e-commerce. It has only been necessary to add a purchase module that speeds up the transaction and facilitates the user experience.
In addition to the online store, other e-commerce formulas are:
Marketplace : This involves selling products on large platforms or social networks such as Amazon, AliExpress, Wallapop or Facebook, which are designed for individuals and/or companies to create an account and upload their products.
Affiliate : In this case, products are also promoted on an external website, but it is an affiliate website that usually takes a commission. The difference is that, instead of completing the sale directly on the affiliate website, the user follows a link to complete the purchase on the seller's website. An example of this model is Google Shopping and Amazon, which also has an affiliate program.
Subscription : This model is used more for digital content such as online press. It consists of paying in advance to receive the product or service at a certain frequency. One variant is to offer the possibility of becoming a "member" for a period of time and enjoying advantages for doing so.