RESOURCES
FAQ
ABOUT A WEBSITE
ABOUT SERVER
ABOUT eCOMMERCE
ABOUT WEBSITE
Why a website
Your website could reflect your companies image as
presented in other media. You can present your company profile
or have a corporate presentation , adding three-D effects
or motion including audio & video effects without increasing
your cost. The website will give you unlimited commercial
opportunity. It is a site for information exchange vast array
of services and resources online .Website is the information
super-highway where people can exchange information at a faster
pace.
How do people know
I have a website
The web is a complex jumble of documents in which
you will never find the information for which you are looking
without help. A variety of search tools scour the web, like
(AOL's Webcrawler, YAHOO!, and Alta Vista) which helps in
finding an information. You can use these huge databases using
keywords that describe what you are looking for and the search
tool returns a list of matching URLs.
Proper registration and placement with them are an essential
starting point. There are 100's of search engines and directories,
many of them specifically targeted to an industry - such as
cars or insurance. Advertising can be purchased in banner
format for broader reach, bringing traffic to your site from
a related site. It is generally also recommended that you
put your website and email addresses on every form of communication
you have with your customers, including business cards, letterhead,
brochures and advertising.
What is DNS
or Domain Name System
Domain Name System is an Internet service that translates
domain names into IP addresses. Domain names are alphabetic
and hence easy to remember rather than the IP address which
will be be 255.255.255.255. . The domain name is divided into
3 parts user computer name, the mid -level domain and the
top level domain. The top level domains are com, edu, org,
mil,net, gov controlled in the United states.
Can I update my website
periodically
Of course! . Things change in a heart-beat on the internet,
and the best advertising is based on repetition. Your site
should be continually freshened, offering new information
or specials as well as incorporating new technology as it
explodes. Customers who are interested, but not immediately
motivated to buy, should have a reason to come back when they
are ready. If you want to take your changes in-house, there
are various methods for doing that, as well, depending upon
your business's hardware and personnel.
Can I keep track of the visitors to my
site
If you already have a website on a different host
server, you can get some numbers through counters and cookies
and custom programming. you will automatically can check the
statistics at your convenience by visiting your own "stats"
page. We will advise you of much more than your total number
of "hits". The information gathered can tell us
which technology levels are good for your visitors, what time
of day and week is strongest, and whether we are succeeding
in leading guests through your system to the final sale or
contact point - what attracts them, and where we may be losing
them.
How to get email - ID on
the website
E-mail addresses can set up on the server for you
at your direction. There is a simple set-up procedure at the
receiving end, as well. To set-up any one machine and dial-up
connection to receive more than 1 or 2 separate email addresses
typically requires either instructions or special software.
A standard website with a domain name registered allows up
to 20 aliases for mail @yourdomain.com
How do I
market with my website
Your market will be aiming for you, and your webmaster's
job is to make you easy to find.You absolutely must determine
your target market in order to expect the best results. Because
of the enormity of the World Wide Web, search engines and
directories are an essential part of getting around - they
are the road map and transportation system that netizens use
to transport them where they want to be. The manner of their
indexing is dynamic, and both visible and invisible content
are used to determine when the searcher is looking for what
your website actually provides.
How
much will it cost to make a website
e-Mail to info@ivision.in
for a basic price list .
ABOUT SERVER:
What is FTP
?
FTP stands for file transfer protocol, which is a
way to send files to server. Using FTP one can update files
at a server. People who create webpages use FTP to move their
files to the server from where they can be accessed by others.
FTP requires client to log into an active FTP server to which
commands are submitted. Most FTP servers on the internet accept
a type of connection known as anonymous. FTP is mostly used
to retrieve files from remote servers. You can also use FTP
to send files to your ISP account or web server to provide
access to friends and associates and more.
What is HTTP ?
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, an Internet protocol
that enables the distribution of hypertext documents. Like
other TCP/IP services, such as FTP, NNTP and SMTP, HTTP is
a client/server protocol. HTTP's evolution is motivated by
concern over its viability as the dominant Internet protocol
and future pipeline for distributed object computing. Towards
this end, the W3C [World Wide Web Committee] and IETF [Internet
Engineering Task Force] are collaborating on HTTP/1.1. This
upgrade addresses performance issues, state management (cookies),
transparent content negotiation, universal time conventions,
and PEP, a dynamic extension mechanism for HTTP -- all lacking
in v1.0.
What is HTTPd ?
It stands for HTTP daemon. A daemon is a Unix background process
that implements the server side of a protocol. For example,
FTPd is the File Transfer Protocol daemon.HTTPd is the program
you would run on a Unix platform to establish a web server.
Daemons are unique to Unix (which some would call a demonic
OS ;-). On other platforms, such as Microsoft Windows NT,
the web server is a background process implemented as a system
service.
What are error numbers like 400&
402
HTTP Status Codes for error message are given below
:
Error Messages
400 - Error in request syntax.
401 - Request requires an Authorization: field, and the client
did not provide one. This response is accompanied by a list
of acceptable authorization schemes use WWW-Authenticate response
headers. Error 401 can be part of a client/server dialogue
to negotiate encryption and user authentication schemes.
402 - The requested operation costs money, and the client
did not specify a valid charge to field.
403 - Request for forbidden resource denied.
404 - Requested resource not found.
500 - The server has encountered an internal error and cannot
continue processing your request.
501 - Request okay but denied because server doesn't support
transaction method.
I have come across Telnet
& Gopher, what are they ?
Telnet is the way to access other computers, assuming
they have given permission, or technically speaking telnet is
a user command and an underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing
remote computers. One can login as a regular user with available
privileges granted to the specific applications and data on
that computer.Gopher is a collection of articles, linked together
via hyperlinks. Clicking an entry in a table of contents or
a related article link will display the relavent article, even
if it is on a server halfway across the world. Gopher technologies
were the precursor of the web browser and world wide web.
What Server software is available for
Microsoft Windows NT.
Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS),
bundled with NT Server 4.0;
Netscape Enterprise Server and lightweight FastTrack Server;
and WebSite from O'Reilly & Associates.
Is HTTP platform independent ?
Yes !! The authors of the World Wide Web took the
credo of platform independence seriously. As a result, web
servers can be set up on almost any computer, including (but
not limited to) Windows 3.1, Apple Macintosh and PowerPC,
IBM OS/2, Digital VAX/VMS, mainframes running MVS, and the
Commodore Amiga (!).
What is Intranet
& Extranet ?
Intranet is network within an enterprise, a technology
that permits organizations to define itself as a whole entity.
It consists of many interlinked local area networks and also
uses leased lines in the wide-area network. The main purpose
of intranet is to share company information and computing
resources among employees.
Intranet uses TCP/IP, HTTP and other Internet protocols and
looks like a version of Internet. Intranet resides behind
a firewall and is accessible only to people who are members
of the same company or organization. Extranet provides various
accessibility to outsiders. The users can access an extranet
only if they have a valid username and password. Extranet
is a collaborative network that uses internet technologies
to link business with their suppliers, customers and businessmen
who share common goals. Application of extranet include private
news group.
What is CGI ?
CGI ( Common Gateway Interface ) is a first-generation
Web technology that, because of its simplicity and universality,
continues to have wide appeal for developing dynamic pages.
Web sites implemented with CGI are relatively easy to port
across HTTP software and platforms, because most web servers
natively support CGI. In addition, many CGI programs are developed
in Perl, a portable open-source scripting language with a
large and growing library of cost-free modules and native
database extensions. For these reasons CGI remains a reasonable
choice for building lightly loaded or relatively static web
sites.
On the downside, each invocation of a CGI program launches
a separate process, making the technique slow, resource-intensive
and non-scaleable. CGI itself provides no support for encryption,
concurrency control, transaction integrity, or many other
features associated with enterprise applications. CGI programs
run slowly and gobble server resources, making them a poor
choice for heavily loaded
web sites. FastCGI is a better-performing extension of the
original for which speedups of a factor of five have been
reported. Version v1.5.2 of the Apache web server supports
FastCGI.
What are Server Side Includes (SSI)
When you need to patch a small section of on-the-fly
content into an otherwise static page, CGI is a heavy-handed
solution. An alternative almost as widely supported as CGI
is server-side includes (SSI), which allow you to "include"
dynamic content into web pages using special HTML tags. Performance
impact. Unlike standard HTML, which is parsed and rendered
by a web browser after the page has been served, SSI tags
are parsed on the server (hence, "server-side includes").
Finding and parsing these tags can slow server response, so
webmasters typically specify which files contain SSI tags
by using a unique file extension, such as .shtml or .shtm.
This is done by adding a line to the MIME content type definition:Only
files with this MIME type will be parsed by the server.
What is ASP
ASP is Microsoft's recommended technology for generation dynamic
web pages. Only Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
and Personal Web Server (PWS) support ASP natively. A product
called Chili!ASP from Chili!Soft can be installed to emulate
ASP on other platforms.
Definition : An Active Server Page is a file with the extension
.ASP that contains a combination of HTML statements and server-side
script logic. Either JavaScript or VBScript can be used to
compose Active Server Pages.
What is an
Application Server
With regard to web applications, an application server is
software that mediates between a web server and back-end systems
such as databases or legacy applications. Requests from a
client web browser are passed by the web server to the application
server, which applies logic and communicates with back-end
systems as necessary to compose an HTML response returned
by the web server to the requesting browser. It also can be
described as software that runs on a middle tier, between
Web browser-based thin clients and back-end databases and
business applications. Application servers handle all of the
application logic and connectivity that old-style client-server
applications contained. " (CNET News.com) Integrated
development environments (IDE) are tools for building and
hosting web-based applications capable of accessing back-end
data stores.
Transaction application servers emphasize security, load balancing
and transaction integrity, typically for e-commerce or extranet
applications. Pricier than IDEs, this class includes Bluestone
Sapphire/Web, Sun Microsystems NetDynamics, Netscape Application
Server, and IBM WebSphere. Knowledge management servers stress
process automation and integrated access to enterprise data
and documents. KM platforms come from traditional document
management vendors such as FileNet and Documentum, as well
as newer entrants like Open Text Corporation.
Can you explain databases
related to servers
Web applications are multi-tiered, so they use data
access technologies familiar to designers of client/server
systems:
ODBC
native connectors
JDBC
several techniques based on Microsoft OLE-DB.
(See the next question for more on these techniques.)
A web server can connect with these services via any of the
application technologies described above, such as CGI or NSAPI.
For example, a data-driven web application could consist of
a CGI script written in oraperl, an open source Perl extension
that enables direct manipulation of Oracle tables. A special
consideration arises because HTTP is a stateless protocol;
it sets up a new connection for each client request. To offset
this performance-killing limitation web developers are forced
to employ a number of workarounds such as connection pooling
and result caching. Future versions of HTTP will probably
support state, simplifying Internet application design.
How secure is the encryption used by SSL
SSL uses public-key encryption to exchange a session key between
the client and server; this session key is used to encrypt
the http transaction (both request and response). Each transaction
uses a different session key so that if someone manages to
decrypt a transaction, that does not mean that they've found
the server's secret key; if they want to decrypt another transaction,
they'll need to spend as much time and effort on the second
transaction as they did on the first.
Netscape servers and browsers do encryption using either a
40-bit secret key or a 128-bit secret key. Many people feel
that using a 40-bit key is insecure because it's vulnerable
to a "brute force" attack (trying each of the 2^40
possible keys until you find the one that decrypts the message).Using
a 128-bit key eliminates this problem because there are 2^128
instead of 2^40 possible keys.Unfortunately, most Netscape
users have browsers that support only 40-bit secret keys.
This is
because of legal restrictions on the encryption software that
can be exported from the United States.
What is IIS
Internet Information Server -- High-end enterprise-level server
for Windows NT platforms Microsoft has quickly made its Internet
Information Server (IIS) into one of the best Web servers
on the 'net. While only available for Windows NT, IIS has
transformed the NT platform into a viable solution for deliver
Web-based applications. No longer do Web administrators have
to turn to UNIX platforms for fast and reliable Web servers;
IIS is just as powerful and much easier to set up and maintain
than many of its UNIX-based competitors. IIS brings together
the integration of its own Web services with the Windows NT
core system and networking capabilities and the distributed
application infrastructure of Microsoft's Transaction Server
2.0. IIS is only available for the Server edition of Windows
NT 4.0, but it is a free download as part of the Windows NT
4.0 Option Pack. IIS 4.0 offers a superb platform for building
sophisticated internet and intranet applications. The latest
release is vastly superior to previous versions and fixes
most if not all of the weaknesses of prior offerings. Beyond
the core HTTP 1.1 services are a variety of tools including
a Transaction Server (for building distributed applications),
Index Server (indexing of HTML pages and MS Office documents),
Certificate Server (managing digital certificates), Site Analyst
(site management and usage), Internet Connection Services
for Microsoft Remote Access Service (creation of Virtual Private
Networks), Mail Server, and NNTP News Server.
Of these tools the NNTP and SMTP support are the least impressive.
NNTP support only works for internal newsgroups; Usenet news
feeds are unsupported. The SMTP support enables you to develop
applications that send and receive messages; however, POP
support is not provided. IIS features include crash protection
for reliability, transactional Active Server pages, support
for Java (accomplished with Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine),
script debugging, support for multiple Web sites, integrated
search engine capabilities (create custom search forms with
Active Server pages, ActiveX Data Objects, and SQL queries),
content management and site analysis tools, automated management
support, integrated message queuing, full standards compliance
(including HTTP 1.1 for increased Internet performance), and
an integrated certificate server (with special security enhancements
for international banks using 128-bit encryption Server Gated
Crypto technology). For Windows 95 and Windows NT Workstation
users, the NT 4.0 Option Pack also includes Microsoft's Personal
Web Server 4.0 (PWS). PWS is a desktop Web server that makes
it easy to publish personal home pages, serve small Web sites,
and share documents via a local intranet.
Site administration for IIS is performed using the Microsoft
Management Console (MMC). Via this interface you can manage
access and security restrictions at the site, directory and
file level. If you are using virtual sites you can specify
the estimated daily traffic for each site (which controls
how much memory IIS allocates for each Web site) and limit
the amount of server bandwidth a particular site can use.
Most settings can also be configured remotely using Microsoft
Internet Explorer. Active Server Page (ASP) improvements in
the latest release of IIS include additional support for transaction
processing and memory isolation.
A common problem in earlier versions of IIS was that a single
ASP application crash on a virtual site could bring down the
entire Web Server and other sites on the same box. This problem
has been virtually eliminated with v4.0 of IIS. One of IIS's
few downsides is the lack of support for UNIX platforms. Performance
is also a little slower than in IIS 3.0, but this won't be
noticeable with most sites. All the product documentation
is available online, but it pales in comparison to O'Reilly's
WebSite's superb documentation, making third party documentation
a likely necessity. Despite these minor drawbacks, the latest
release of IIS far surpasses the competition and comes with
an excellent price tag, making it the best choice for most
NT-based Web sites. Microsoft has also released a patch that
fixes the Microsoft IIS "GET" Vulnerability which
could allow denial-of-service attacks to be mounted against
Web servers. The patch is available for versions 3.x and 4.x
on both Intel and Alpha platforms. From Microsoft, "The
vulnerability involves the HTTP GET method, which is used
to obtain information from an IIS Web server. Specially-malformed
GET requests can create a denial of service situation that
consumes all server resources, causing a server to 'hang.'
"In some cases, the server can be put back into service
by stopping and restarting IIS; in others, the server may
need to be rebooted. This situation cannot happen accidentally.
The malformed GET requests must be deliberately constructed
and sent to the server. It is important to note that this
vulnerability does not allow data on the server to be compromised,
nor does it allow any privileges on it to be usurped."
What is Microsoft Site Server
Microsoft Site Server - Advanced site-deployment
software for intranets and eCommerce. At the highest end of
public Web servers, there are really two goals in mind. To
the end user, the high-end server must present a slick public
face in the hopes of attracting a high level of site traffic
and commerce. Within the enterprise, the high-end server must
be the gatekeeper, coordinating efforts between a score of
other servers that handle specific tasks. In this milieu,
using the term "Web server" as a singular term is
misleading, and success depends on how well the
different parts integrate and how easy it is for a site development
team to develop applications. The level of integration between
Site Server and other high-end Microsoft development tools,
such as Visual InterDev and FrontPage, is rather impressive.
Instead of going out and buying six different products to
enable high-level Web commerce, Site Server offers all of
the necessary tools under a single umbrella. Here's where
a little operating-system philosophy is in order. UNIX is
really a collection of small tools, and the trick to using
UNIX on any level is knowing what tools work with other tools
and how to integrate them. This is one of the most frustrating
things about UNIX for those coming from a Windows environment,
even though for the most part UNIX tools are more powerful
than their Windows counterparts.
Of course, the advantage of a Windows environment is that
it provides a more graceful interface to its tools. With Site
Server, this role falls to Microsoft Management Console, which
controls most of the Site Server functionality (alas, you'll
need to use other Microsoft tools for usage analysis). And
that's why Site Server is such a quantum leap for webmasters
-- it provides a graceful interface to a set of integrated,
advanced Web tools. Site Server also represents a great leap
forward in a Web-based approach to commerce, borrowing as
much from the venerable Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
as from Web standards.
Basically, you'll need to set up a pipeline for enabling
transactions. On the lower end, an Order Processing Pipeline
(OPP) can be used for credit-card orders and for verifying
payment. For larger-scale commercial efforts, you can use
the Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP), which enables all
binary-data transactions via XML and EDI. CIP represents the
Component Object Model (COM) objects that use Distributed
COM to exchange data via SMTP or HTTP servers.
We installed Site Server Commerce Edition and set up a test
Web site to sell merchandise from the Northern League (an
independent baseball league in the Upper Midwest and Canada),
selling a wide range of baseball-related merchandise and (hypothetically)
using EDI to maintain inventory from a variety of vendors,
with the added twist of offering instant conversions from
American dollars to Canadian dollars (and vice versa) using
links to online banking sites. We also tested online-commerce
abilities to offer real-time ticketing using (again, hypothetically)
links to other transaction servers located at the eight stadiums
in the league.
Within Microsoft Site Server 3.0 is a new Ad Server, which
can be used to set up a sophisticated rotation of ad banners
that differ based on time of day and the day of the week,
coordinating ad banners to upcoming games and events. With
it, we linked ads based on the page served; users who summoned
a Duluth-Superior Dukes page received banners advertising
Dukes merchandise and Duluth-area advertisers. Also new in
Site Server is Intelligent CrossSell, which takes information
about a particular shopper, either from the current session
or the shopper's history, and then makes recommendations for
additional purchases.
An ominous "popularity filtering" capability allows
server managers to substitute recommendations of popular items
for recommendations of not-so-popular items.
What is Apache server
Apache - High-end enterprise-level server for Unix and Windows
95/98/NT platforms Apache remains the king of Web servers
despite intense efforts by Microsoft and Netscape to gain
dominance in the market. In fact, the latest Netcraft surveys
indicate that the freeware Apache is widening its lead over
the rest of the field. Apache users have come to rely on the
server's rock-solid reliability, outstanding performance,
and rich set of features. As its two closest competitors have
found out, a brand name alone does not necessarily equate
to a loyal customer following (Netscape SuiteSpot), nor does
a plump pocketbook ensure market share (Microsoft IIS).
The keys to Apache's attractiveness and popularity lie instead
in the qualities listed above and its extensibility, its freely
distributed source code, and active user support for the server.
And version 1.3.0, now in official release, is already being
touted as the most stable and fastest version of Apache ever.
When coupled with the fact that the server will now run on
Windows NT and 95/98, Apache appears poised to make inroads
on Microsoft's sacred soil as well. Based originally on NCSA's
freely available HTTPd server, Apache's features and strengths
are too numerous to list. And if more than half of the Internet's
Web sites use Apache, the server must be doing something right,
right? Among the most notable features are its cross-platform
support, protocol support (HTTP/1.1), modularity (API), security,
logging, and overall performance and robustness. Apache runs
on Windows (95/98/NT), OS/2, and all the major variants of
Unix. The server is fully compliant with HTTP/1.1 and supports
API and ISAPI (NT). Apache distributes a core set of modules
that handle everything from user authentication and cookies
to typo correction in URLs. There are many other tried and
true custom modules readily available as well. Apache's overall
security, performance, and robustness are unquestionable --
many of the most accessed sites in the world run Apache or
Apache derivatives.
Public distribution of the source code results in patches
for the software being distributed quickly, and allowing public
scrutiny helps ensure that security holes in the software
are promptly caught and reported. As a result, Apache's large
user base has allowed its developers to create a package that
is extremely stable and secure and one that is also able to
compete more effectively with commercial packages in terms
of both raw speed and integrated features. Despite all of
its strengths, Apache certainly isn't for everybody. Setup
and maintenance of the server are accomplished via command-line
scripting tools.
Unlike most popular commercial servers, Apache offers neither
browser-based maintenance capabilities nor any GUI configuration/administration
tools. This is an advantage for some developers, but for others
it can translate into higher deployment and maintenance costs,
especially if the site's administrators are unfamiliar with
the fundamentals of the server. The lack of visuals, wizards,
and/or browser-based administration tools may be enough to
turn some users away.
Furthermore, Apache's "user-driven" technical support
via newsgroups may not get the job done for more than a few
developers. There are, however, several companies that do
provide full commercial support -- for a price, of course.
The atypical development and marketing style of the Apache
server have not precluded it from becoming the most popular
world wide Web server on the Internet today. Apache's robust
design and extensibility, coupled with its freeware status
and the availability of its source code to the public,make
Apache a good choice for enterprise-level Web sites and for
individuals and workgroups that use UNIX or a combination
of UNIX and NT platforms. While Netscape and Microsoft sustain
their search for a chink in Apache's armor, the most popular
server on the 'net continues to show that it can withstand
the competition's best efforts and still reign supreme as
the champion of Web servers.
What is Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 is a full-featured
mail server that provides a fine-grained approach to user
permissions while also adding some basic groupware functionality.
Exchange Server offers all the mail functionality you'd want,
including an IMAP4 server and an LDAP directory service. There
are two editions of Exchange Server: a Standard Server and
an Enterprise Server. The Standard Server includes Active
Server Components, news support, and a set of handy connectors
to other e-mail systems (cc:Mail, Notes, and the Internet).
The Enterprise Edition is designed for larger, clustered enterprise
server installations and includes e-mail gateways for IBM
OfficeVision, X.400, VM, and SNADS (provided Microsoft SNA
Server is also installed). There are also many ties between
the Internet and the World Wide Web within Exchange Server.
For
instance, Exchange Server now supports Web scripted applications
that are run by Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).
Web users can access their mail and news discussions via a
Web browser. The Web pages generated by Exchange Server's
Web view look very similar to the interface presented by Outlook,
so users will feel a consistency when moving between applications.
And Java applets allow groupware features to be accessed via
the Web browser. You must have a host of other Microsoft products
installed on a server before Exchange Server can run, most
of which are contained within either Windows NT Server 4.0
(such as Internet Explorer 4.0 and Internet Information Server
3.0) or Windows NT Server 4.0 Service Pack 3 or later (which
adds support for Microsoft Active Server Pages). Administration
is done from the Exchange Administrator and employs a fine-grained
approach to services and user privileges but lacks some basic
sysadmin functionality. You can set web, IMAP, SMTP (outgoing
mail), and NNTP (Usenet news) access for users or groups.
In addition, you can set data-storage limits for users, groups,
or the system as a whole, and you can determine how long messages
are stored on the same basis. And you can restrict user access
to specific times in the day and logons from specific workstations.
Alas, administration must be performed when logged on the
NT server as no remote browser-based administration is available,
and replication is a tedious chore that is basically performed
by hand. Like every other Microsoft product, Exchange Server
5.5 is tied to other Microsoft products, this time both for
users and administrators. The client of choice for Exchange
Server 5.5 is Outlook 98 (included with the Service Pack 1
CD-ROM and also available for download from Microsoft), but
any IMAP4 or POP3 mail client can access Exchange Server 5.5;
they just won't have access to the more advanced features.
Visual InterDev is supported as a development environment.
The Exchange Server user data is tied closely to the Windows
NT user directory; you can't set up an Exchange Server account
for a user who doesn't have a Windows NT account. (This is
handy for users, who have the same passwords for mail and
network access, but not so handy for security-conscious system
administrators who would rather have another level of protection
available.) When setting up Exchange Server, user names and
passwords can be imported directory from a Windows NT Server
Domain or a NetWare NDS directory. You can set up Exchange
Server to be the hub of sorts of a more extensive mail-server
array through a feature called Smart Host, which forwards
outbound SMTP mail to a third-party SMTP server. This allows
you to set up direct communications between networked mail
servers.
ABOUT e-COMMERCE :
What is eCommerce
Electronic commerce (eCommerce) is the idea of doing
business electronically over the Internet. No longer bound
by time or geography, e-commerce provides store owners with
ubiquitous access to their customers. This significantly expands
a store owner's opportunity to satisfy demand for products,
services, and information of each customer.Online purchasing
is becoming as common and convenient as ordering by telephone
or fax.
How does an online store work / How does a typical
transaction at a retail store work
You select the items you wish to purchase and put
them in your shopping cart. When you're ready to checkout,
you take them to a sales clerk at the cash register where
you are given the option to pay by cash, check or credit card.
The cash register used to process your payment is actually
referred to as a Point-of-Sale (POS terminal). The cash register
(POS terminal) is connected to the retail store's bank processing
network where the credit card and/or check is verified as
valid either with available credit and/or a valid banking
institution. You are then given a receipt and the transaction
is complete. E-commerce services are very similar and operate
just as stated above, only without a sales clerk. Just think
of your computer as your sales staff. E-mail receipts are
sent after a transaction is processed giving your customer
an instantaneous online verification that the transaction
was completed.
What are the benefits of an online store
- Increase revenue
- Low-cost/high-payback alternative to traditional physical
store or mail-order catalog.
- Avoid losing sales to competitors who are online
- Immediate international sales presence
- Shop 24 hrs/day, 365 days/year
- Expand customer base
- Set up shop anywhere, no need to re-locate
- Low-cost way to turn your Web site into a profit center
- Reduce phone cost due to customer support via email
- Create customized mailing list
What makes a Successful Online Store
- Easy-to-use
- Appealing
- Good customer service
- Unsaturated market
- Know who your competitors are.
Will
your online store be secure
Yes, because we use digital authentication services provided
by either VeriSign, Inc. or Thawte to ensure that orders are
secure. A Digital ID binds a company's identity to a digital
key which can be used to conduct secure transactions.
The Secure Hypertext Transport Protocol (S-HTTP) is an extension
of the Web protocol (HTTP) and adds security features to it.
The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, originally introduced
in Netscape 2.0, is a data encryption technique that allows
for secure transactions across the Internet. This software
will encrypt a customer's credit card and purchase information
as it is sent over the Internet from the customer's Web browser
to the Web server hosting the online store. The customer will
know their connection is secure because the lock icon in the
bottom left corner of their Web browser will be closed (locked)
instead of open and the URL at the top of the browser will
have https instead of http at the beginning.
What about shipping
and taxes
Shipping and taxes can be defined according to each
store owner's requirements and are calculated and added into
the purchase amount for display to the consumer.
What about
real-time payment
When transactions are authorized in real-time, the
need for manual tracking of invalid credit card numbers is
eliminated so less sales staff is needed. Sale proceeds from
credit card transactions are automatically deposited electronically
to the store owner's bank account.
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