If you have a business which you think is suitable for selling products or services online you may already have thought about creating an ecommerce enabled website. You may even already have your product catalogue online in some form, though not necessarily in a form that lends itself easily to an ecommerce setup. Here I’m going to talk about what to look out for when considering an ecommerce implementation, how these systems are put together and how you might structure them and their connection to your existing work methods.

In the beginning was the 'brochureware' website when businesses just wanted to get some details of what they do and where they are online. As security and trust became more established the big players started selling things online and so too did the smaller players. That's one of those advantages of the Internet, you can compete a little easier, sure you still have limited resources but ecommerce is all about working smarter and not necessarily harder. Small businesses are often smarter and more flexible than the big players. So, in order to work smarter you need a system that’s fairly easy to manage on a day to day basis that is a storefront on the Internet for you.