How e-commerce Works?

Ecommerce stands for Electronic Commerce, is something where a business customer purchase anything like good, services etc. on the Internet using electronic medium like credits cards. The purpose of this is to make the purchase over Internet fast and easy. At anytime, whether its day or night; from anywhere whether its USA or India; anyone can go to Internet and make purchase online. This really brings the world closer. This is how it works:

• Customer visit a merchant's web site.
• He purchase something and make online transaction.
• Payment gateways handles his transaction and make the whole process secure.
• Merchant process the customer payment and funds debited from the customer account to merchant's account.

From a business prospective view, they have to integrate ecommerce software into their product in order to make it available for online selling. This integration could be a custom solution for their web site, or they can use readymade services available on Internet like shopping cart software, third party payment gateway. In a recent post "Sell your products online using shopping cart software" I already wrote some benefits of using third party integration.