Edbrook

Innovative Web & Graphics Design

e-Commerce

Databases form a critical integral part of many business websites. They are used to store and find information such as stock, prices and orders. A website with an integral database can be used to create a powerful and easy to browse catalogue for all your goods. You can even take this a stage further and sell goods at any time of day through your web site. To demonstrate some of our e-Commerce capabilities we have created the DVD Central site.

Trading through a website is a very effective way of increasing sales, but even if you don’t want to sell through the web, the ability to show your customers what you have in stock and what your prices are is a very powerful way of winning business.

The seisui web developers have a wide range of database skills and can build a complete website and integrated database to suit your needs.

In the following sections we describe three increasing levels of functionality that a database can add to your site.

Web Catalogues

A web catalogue could be used to detail part or all of the stock you are selling. From books to plant seeds; from toys to health products; from movie memorabilia to cars anything can be found in catalogues on websites. A web catalogue can be any size. For example, a website promoting the cars for sale this week at a car showroom may list 30 cars, but a catalogue for a bookstore may list thousands of titles. Seisui can design and build a web catalogue that meets your needs. We will design you a friendly, simple to use browser that lets your website visitors quickly find what they are looking for. We will also build you a simple secure interface that allows you to change the prices of your stock, add or remove stock and even see what people have been looking for!

Web Shopping Carts

The next level of sophistication is the shopping cart. This allows your website visitors to select a number of goods and see the total cost. Once the visitor has chosen the goods they are interested in, they can print a record of the cart and post it to you with the payment, or bring the printed order with them when they visit your shop. The visitor could even reserve the goods through the website.

But to fully exploit the power of the web, a business can collect payments on-line and post the goods the same day.

Web Payments

For a complete mail order service, seisui can add secure on-line payments to your website. There are two options for web payments off-line processing and on-line processing.

Shops or businesses that already have a means of collecting payments by credit and debit cards typically use off-line processing. The shopkeeper logs on to a secure area of the website and sees the waiting orders. He then collects the stock for the order and checks that the order can be completed. He then reads the credit/debit card details from the secure website and types them into his point of sale terminal, as if taking a telephone order. Once the payment has cleared he posts the goods and clears the card details from the database. The advantage of off-line processing is that the shopkeeper can check he has the goods in the shop before debiting the customer.

The second option is on-line payment collection. This is where the website automatically completes the sale transaction without any intervention. This saves the business the task of handling the credit card details but it requires that the website stock database is completely accurate. This solution is best suited to businesses selling via the internet only.