E-commerce Portals

Portals are online platforms that allow businesses to conduct interactions and transactions with customers and suppliers instantly, facilitating a more intuitive and connected operation. An integrated portal solution allows organisations in the agriculture supply chain to have one interface shared across their business community.

At a basic level, web portals make ordering easier and more reliable, with full visibility and 24/7 order placement. Suppliers, for example, can receive orders via their online portal, offering automatic status updates and other functionality as required. This allows businesses to make transactions more efficient and effective, no matter the size of the order or the customer. Going beyond a simple eCommerce option, a portal solution delivers a more professional and smooth business experience for all parties.

Notable improvements to business operations include:

• Reduced errors: No more wasted time or correcting the fallout from simple mistakes. Portal solutions remove the need to manually input data, eliminating errors and their resulting costs.
• Ease of business: Smoother transactions and communications between businesses, with no need to make radical changes to current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
• Increased customer loyalty: Portals don’t just make the ordering process more reliable and robust. Businesses seeking to remain competitive can offer attractive benefits via their portal, such as loyalty schemes and seasonal offers.

Portals are best suited to businesses that need to deal regularly with multiple buyers or sellers especially for customer ordering. In particular, manufacturers benefit from the streamlines ordering and tracking granted by a portal solution.

Web Store and Horizontal /Vertical portals

• A Web Portal is a website which works as a single source for different information on a particular domain. It is a useful access point which helps the users to go easily from one page to another while navigating for information which they are in search of.
• Web Portal gives a list of information arranged well for the accessing purpose of the users. Placing the right amount of keywords in the pages at the right positions also can make a difference to your website traffic. Ultimately what matters in content development is to understand and provide what customers search for the most online.
• Portals have information stored which links to various topics like business, new, finances, travel, entertainment, shopping and so on. The popular portals on the internet are Yahoo!, AOL and Google. These portals can be termed as personal portals, as it stores the history data, emails and profile information of the user.
• High resolution images and big files of videos may be required to attract people but it’ll be of no use if the page takes long time to load. An ideal portal depends mainly on search and navigation, notification, personalization, task management, work flow and collaboration.

Enterprise portal development can be divided into two divisions:

• Horizontal Enterprise Portals or Mega Portals or HEPs
• Vertical Portals or Vertical Enterprise Portals or VEPs.

Horizontal Enterprise Portals (HEPs)

A Horizontal Portal is a website that is public and helps to give its users all the necessary services they are in need of. Examples of horizontal portals or HEPs are NetCenter and MyExcite. Horizontal Enterprise Portals include chat groups, horoscopes, weather, stock prices, news and shopping.

These send requests to users for making their page the first page one sees while using the web. These personalizes the page one sees by selecting the city one chooses for knowing the weather, selecting the new sources and stocks one likes to be displayed on the page and alter the web page appearance.

Thus one is able to build multiple stock portfolios and see the updated valuations very often. It has to be noted that if one access HEP from another computer, it loses all the personalization characteristics.

HEPs does not give any kind of information related to any organizations, as they are not connected to any data sources of any organization other than their own. It delivers access to all the web information one needs on one’s own organization.

Vertical Enterprise Portals (VEPs)

Vertical Enterprise Portals or VEPs deliver information related to any organization.  A Vertical Enterprise Portal is an enterprise portal which is used in a specific department for particular business functions like accounting, customer service or e-commerce. When a user logs to a VEP, a customized portal page is produced. This is linked to the user who is logged on to.

Steps in setting up Business on Internet

1. Create a great site: This is No. 1 for a reason. You have to have a great-looking, intuitive, easy-to-navigate site if you are going to be taken seriously by potential e-customers. Your site must look professional. Pictures and content must load quickly. There can be no dead links. Have a robust “About” page.

The good news is that it is easy and affordable to create a great site look for online hosts that have pre-made templates you can customize.

Web surfers who come to your site will judge it in about three seconds. That’s all you’ve got. You better impress them the moment they hit it.

2. Pick your products: You should try to find the right product at the right price, he will make a profit. Where do you find great, inexpensive products? It depends on what you plan to sell. It may be a matter of spending weekends picking up some good, cheap stuff. If you want a more formal arrangement, there are wholesalers and distributors for almost any product you need.
3. Have an online catalog or store: When you shop online, there is usually a catalog of products to choose from: Tiny pictures with product descriptions. That is what you have to do. Happily, you do not have to create this from scratch. Your e-commerce site host (see below) will offer a store creation tool, with point-and-click ways to add products, pictures, and descriptions.
4. Have the ability to process payments: This issue is two-fold: The financial ability to process credit card payments comes when you have a merchant account. Search for that term online. The physical ability to process such payments is, again, something your host will offer. Search for “online merchant services” or “E-commerce hosting.”
5. Market and promote your site: All these steps are important, but this one may be a little more important. People have to find your site. No matter how nice it looks or how cool your products, if no one knows about the site, it is a waste of time, money, and effort.

Master search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Engage in viral marketing. Tweet. Have a Facebook fan page. Try pay-per-click. Advertise.

6. Fulfillment: You have to deliver what you sell, on budget and on time. Don’t forget to add the cost of shipping to your prices.
7. After-sales support: How will you handle returns? What should you upsell? Support is the difference between a one-time sale and creating a customer for life.