Before you read through this valuable document, please ask yourself few important questions:
- Are you willing to increase sales through additional sources, like web?
- Do you need more than just a product catalog on web?
- Is secure online Payments, Shipping of Goods, Order Management etc. your primary concerns for an online store deployment?

If these questions touches to your requirements somewhere, this document is just right for you.

Going online is an excellent way of scaling up and spreading your customer base. Looking at phenomenal success stories of Dell, art.com, amazon.com, ebay.com etc., these online successful companies offer products no different to what you can offer. There is no denying the fact that you already have two very important assets to be able to launch yourself well for additional customers on the internet space. These assets are:

1) Products, ready to be sold, vivek
2) A Market, ready to buy them.

Selling these stock of products to the markets through a phenomenal medium that has evolved not much before is ‘Web’.

Why we call it as a phenomenal medium is because statistics shows that today, there is parallel amount of sales happening on web as it is happening physically. It is also said that comparatively more sales transactions shall happen on web in coming times as buying and selling on internet is growing at a very fast pace.

Success of www.arts.com shows that its possible to sell art online which is considered as “need to touch, feel and see” before buying. Ebay, sells online virtually every product that is available on earth.

This also shows that there are consumers who prefers to do purchases only on web and whose base is increasing by each day.

Moving ahead with what makes it possible to successfully sell your products through this phenomenal medium, I shall list components that every online store should have to build and connect to new customers on internet space.

1) Web Host & a website name:
Choice of right webhost is very important for a website to go long term. Server reliability, Backup intervals, number of ftp accounts, number of email accounts, sub-domain creations, databases, bandwidth allocation etc. are few most important aspects that points towards right investments for a right Web Host.

2) Secure server:
Securing client credit card information or other important data is foremost important concern while a customer orders on any website. These information can be secured through implementing encryption of some kind while customer is disclosing important data like credit cards information etc.

3) Merchant Account:
For accepting credit card payments online, owning a merchant account is essential. This acts as an affiliate to a bank and processes credit card payments that you accept from your customers.

4) User interface & Database programming:
To be able to provide a way to browse products or choose products from online product catalog,  programming is done to automate this procedure and give a customer easy way to navigate the catalog. This processes database in the backend for easy accessibility and trackability in later stages.

5) Product & Content management:
All the content in the customer end and in the database can be controlled and manipulated through an advanced content management system. This CMS looks after products, its images, its attributes, and all other aspects for the customer experience on the website.

6) Search engine Marketing:
Search engines are the largest source of your website penetration on web. There are few very important search engines that are mostly accessed by the customer to be able to find your website on web. Marketing through search engine involves getting better positions on search engine through latest algorithms formulated by these search engines.

7) Sales Management and Statistics:
When sales happen, access to statistics helps in planning future marketing efforts. It also helps in tracking sales vis a vis targets.

8) Customer support mechanism:
Customer experience comes not just from order processing procedures, but also providing them with after sales support. So before purchasing few customers look out for such mechanisms that can help them handle the product well after purchasing it. Such mechanisms educates them and help the website keep in touch and get repeat sales.

9) Search engine friendliness:
Most misunderstood and less known fact is search engine friendliness of a website. Search engines have their own parameters to give appropriate weightage to a website. Search engine friendliness of a website is about website urls, title bar, html tags, w3c.org validations etc. Just to remind you that search engines are the foremost important online marketing tools on the web.

On deployment of above components, your customers are able to: