Brick and Mortar to Online: The History of eCommerce

A Person's Hand Holding Cart With Cardboard Boxes While Shopping Online On Mobile Phone
A Person's Hand Holding Cart With Cardboard Boxes While Shopping Online On Mobile Phone

From primitive methods like trade to methods as complex as online transactions, history has presented many different ways of buying and selling products.  Naturally, online transactions occur on web sites. Some are for recreation and creativity, while many others exist for customers and businesses to communicate with each other.  A lot of the time, this communication involves a kind of purchase.  Typically, a consumer contacts a business to pay for a product or service.  The activity of buying things online has become so common in the wake of these unprecedented times such that there have been many efforts to streamline this process. One of the most common examples of the ways in which technology has been innovating retail is ecommerce.  In fact, there exist many platforms with which to launch an ecommerce store: One does not need to be tech-savvy to sell things online.  Not to gloss over ecommerce’s immediate definition, but it’s straightforward.  Simply, ecommerce is the completion of transactions over the internet.  To make an ecommerce site is to make a site whose role is to allow consumers to purchase products through that site.

How to Make Your eCommerce Site Come to Life

Upon establishing a site, you need to address what that site will accomplish.  It is easy enough to draft an HTML file and a style sheet in order to run a “site” locally.  Writing an HTML file is one of the first tasks many programmers learn to perform.  The task’s ease makes it rewarding.  However, an TML file can’t do much apart from displaying static information, but how can one build a site with which users may interact?  How can one create a site that offers a dynamic display of information, like an ecommerce search bar that populates a series of search results? 

To make a site that’s dynamic and useful to customers, one must create a web app, and in the case of ecommerce, a web app will come down to searching and search results, but do not worry.  You will not have to be a programmer to build a web app because you will be able to outsource a software or online interface.  Many programmers accomplish this from scratch with their own files, but you will not.

What Effects Might Technologies Have on My Search Results?

Let’s say you want to limit the type of results that customers can see when they complete a query.  When your customer types a term into a search bar, irrelevant items may appear by default. Irrelevant items might be articles and web pages in addition to product pages.  You will want your customers to see products only.  If consumers are met with pages and articles upon typing something in, they will not appreciate your site’s search engine, and they will go to a competitor to meet their needs.  Many technologies demonstrate a “type” parameter that one may access via an interface.  With the “type” parameter, one is able to filter items of a specific “type,” which will usually be a product, article, or page.  You’re able to change the allowed type to “product,” exclusively.

Are There Any Other Types of Parameters?

Another important action would be to remove out-of-stock products from the results. There are usually three or so parameters responsible for deciding which products to display.  The simplest is often denoted as “show:” Display everything the customer wants to see based on that customer’s question.  A software may also offer a kind of “hide” function: In-stock search results are displayed based on a customer’s query.  Finally, a software may have a “last” function, which offers the most information: Out-of-stock results will still be visible to the customer, but out-of-stock results will all be underneath the in-stock results.  Both latter options are useful for at least removing the limelight from items that may not even be available.

Other major tools include defining whether an incomplete word can serve as a prefix to another word.  If a user inputs the word, “surf,” then you may want that user to see surfboards among the results.  By default, this prefix-enabling option may not be active, so it’s important to make sure you’re using these “prefixes,” as long as you think the results they will yield will be relevant to the customer.  They may not be.  Enabling the propagation of potentially relevant terms could yield not-so-relevant terms, too.  Run a few searches yourself, and see if enabling the prefix option makes for a better search.  Many online sources regard the layman’s development of an appropriate ecommerce site. These parameters are some primary items to be cognizant of, but remember not to be overwhelmed by them because they are here to assist you and make your ecommerce experience simpler than it’d otherwise be.


This post is provided by a third party who may receive compensation from the products or services they mention.

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