Five-Part Workshop: How To Build A Linux E-Commerce Site

Who This Seminar Series Is For
Internet commerce requires an incredible amount of sophistication in many disciplines. It is not an easy task. Integrators who are adopting e-commerce into their business models can use this material to help determine what is needed. Those who are advising clients on how to get into e-business can use the material in this series of seminars to help define the issues and challenges.

How E-Commerce Differs From E-Business?
People often mistakenly use the terms e-commerce and e-business interchangeably. E-commerce refers to transacting business over the Internet. E-business refers to the use of Internet protocols and applications to conduct business within an organization. Some examples of e-business include document management, data warehousing and data mining.

E-commerce refers to retail or business-to-business transactions conducted over the Internet using a variety of payment methods. Usually, e-commerce involves the use of Secure Socket Layers (SSL) to create a safe site to transmit credit card information or information you don't want unknown people to see.

To make a complete e-commerce site you need a merchant account, a commercial account, a sales tax permit, and a business license. Tending to those should be a first step but many small to midsized businesses, and even some large ones, mistakenly leave it until the end and become disillusioned somewhere in the process. They begin a starter site and, try to find a unique domain name, which is difficult. They build their site, get it ready to do transactions and then discover they don't have the credit to get a merchant account. If you can't get a merchant account, you can't clear credit card transactions. You'll miss 90 percent of the business conducted over the Internet without a merchant account. Would you go to all the trouble to build a nice Web store only to discover you don't qualify for a merchant account? Not me. This is why it should be investigated first.