Web commerce is a form of electronic commerce. It refers to the area of business which is conducted primarily through the WWW, but may also utilize email and other aspects of the internet.
Merchants set up a website to display their products or services for consumers to access by using a web browser. Websites present the consumer with various options for searching and selecting products and services, which offer speed and convenience of shopping at home. Although the consumer lacks sensory perception of the product, they gain benefits of shopping 24 hours a day with the absence of high pressure salesmen.
Some merchants attract customers to their website by advertising through web banners or email. Other merchants may drive customers to their website through more traditional methods such as print media, radio or television.
Payment is handled in a variety of ways: online credit card payment, mailed cheque or via phone order. For credit card payments, the merchant typically employs a secure payment method using technology such as SSL or TLS. This protects the customer's sensitive information from interception by encrypting all data transferred between the customer's computer and the website's server. The account withdrawal may be conducted by the merchant or through a 3rd party payment service such as PayPal.
Affiliate Marketing
Some online businesses have 'affiliate programs', by means of which others receive a commission for sending them customers. Normally, but not only, this is by means of the affiliate's own website. Traffic may also be driven by email campaigns, word-of-mouth, etc.
Probably the best-known affiliate program is that of Amazon. Originally Amazon offered only books for sale. This market suited many content-oriented websites, since they could promote books relevant to their content. Amazon has expanded its inventory to include many other media and non-media products, and the number of affiliates is claimed to be nearly 1 million.
Almost everyone underestimates the level of effort required to be succesful as an affiliate, and overestimates the revenue that will be generated. They hope that putting a few links to their chosen merchant(s) on their site(s) will generate sales within a few days. Quite often their reasoning is that if they get 100 visitors a day, a few of those will visit the merchant, and buy something... In practice, it takes thousands of visitors to generate just a few sales, and that's highly variable, depending on very many factors.
Frankly, unless you are very lucky, it will take a great deal of time and effort to build a web site up to generating useful revenue. Its not enough to slap a few links up on a personal home page! Probably the largest single factor is the nature and quality of your content. You need to offer something diiferent than the millions of other web sites, and to target an audience who is willing to spend. Freebie sites, for example, rarely attract buyers. You also need to give your site a progessional appearance - people are reluctant to buy from a shoddy-looking site. And then, you need to generate traffic to your site. This is esaier said than done...
