What Is An eCommerce Website and How Are They Built?

E-commerce is the sale and purchasing of services or goods over the internet. It involves electronically transferring data and funds between parties. Essentially, it is online shopping. eCommerce websites allow you to sell and buy goods, products and services online. These eCommerce websites are online portals that facilitate online transactions of these goods and services. 

What is an eCommerce website?

Types of eCommerce Websites

All eCommerce websites will be different, and they will be referred to differently based on their function. Business-to-Business (B2B) is a type of ecommerce site. This is the electronic transactions of goods and services between companies. For example, when a business provides products or services to another business. Business-to-Consumer (B2C) is the transactions of goods between companies and consumers. For example if you buy new clothes from an online retailer. Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) is between consumers, mostly through a third party business. E.g. selling your own personal item to another consumer, such as on eBay. Consumer-to-Business (C2B) is when a consumer will offer a product or service to a business. Such as an Influencer offering to promote a business’ products, in exchange for a fee.

Read more about B2B, B2C, C2B and C2C for eCommerce.

How does eCommerce work?

eCommerce functions similarly to the physical retail industry. The main difference being that brick and mortar stores do not operate online, where ecommerce is entirely online. The journey of an eCommerce business starts off with the setup of an eCommerce website. After this products will be displayed with their necessary details, like prices and descriptions. There should be a nearby CTA button such as ‘Buy Now’ nearby to products so that they can simply click it and make the payment. This is convenient for customers.  At the checkout stage, customers will be asked to fill out a form of their details. They will need to provide necessary information like delivery address’ and contact details. The next stage would be payment. There are different payment methods that are often used in the eCommerce industry. Buyers can usually make payment through a payment gateway such as PayPal, or  they can use their credit or debit card. 

How are eCommerce websites built?

Selling products/services through an online shop is very beneficial. Through an eCommerce website you can easily introduce your products to a large number of customers at once. This is why most business traders have their own eCommerce website. Blue Whale Media often uses WooCommerce to build eCommerce websites for clients. WooComemrce is a plugin which is added to WordPress. This is because WooCommerce offers a lot of flexibility, so we can make sure websites are suited to the type of business.

What is WooCommerce? 

WooCommerce is a plugin for selling products and services. With this plugin, you can sell digital and physical products, manage inventory, change shipping costs and take secure payments. This plugin is also flexible and easy for beginners to use. This allows anyone to set up and run their own professional online store.

Features of WooCommerce

  • You can sell any kind of product, physical or digital
  • Add an unlimited number of products and images
  • Add categories, tags and attributes to any product, making it easy to find and search for them
  • Show reviews and rating of product pages
  • Customise your store location, to change currency language and measurement units to suit your customers
  • Product filtering lets customers sort your products by popularity, rating, price or category
  • Geo-location can detect customer addresses to make shipping and tax simple
  • Embed products and checkout options on any page
  • Choose your payment processing method, using popular providers
  • Manage your customers and their orders. Refunds, customer accounts and guest checkout.