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As the mother of a teenage clothing fanatic I’m often at my local mall. It occurred to me that the shopping experience for my daughter is attractive to her not because she wants to spend my money, but because the experience of buying itself is so rich to the senses.

For example, when we enter her favorite stores the first thing that hits me is the music. If it’s her kind of music, we’re in the right place for her. If the signs near the front of the store have sale prices and notices about markdowns, we’re in the right place for me. Immediately there are two user needs met. Mother’s and daughter’s.

Next, for me, is how products are displayed. I look for orderliness and logical groupings such as jeans in one place, the teeny tiny things she calls shirts in another place, “hoodies” in every possible color in another section. I also look for clean dressing rooms and clues as to how many items she can load up on before she meets their limit. Meanwhile, she’s looking at colors, sizes, textures, and styles. She glides along in her beat up sneakers touching the items as she passes by. Her hands drift along piles of sweaters as if walking through a field of daisies. A certain texture will stop her dead in her tracks and I’ll get that “Mom, look!” expression from her.

It strikes me that some of the stores she insists we stop into don’t offer much for me to do or look at. The d

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Own an ecommerce website? Do you have a mailing list?

If not, you’re potentially leaving a lot of money on the counter.

Keeping in touch with your past customers and visitors, is one of the easiest and cost effective methods of increasing your website sales. You simply must have a mechanism to collect the email addresses of both buyers and browsers alike.

Collecting buyers email addresses is a “no brainer” - after all you need to send them confirmation details, receipts etc. Just make sure you ask their permission to keep them up to date on future special offers.

Collecting visitor details is a bit trickier, and you must offer some kind of incentive in return for them handing over their valuable email address. Here are several ways:

Tags: design, designer, ecommerce, email, Internet, marketing, web, websitedesign, designer, ecommerce, email, Internet, marketing, web, website

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The meaning of the term “electronic commerce” has changed over time. Originally, “electronic commerce” meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI, introduced in the late 1970s) to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.

Later it came to include activities more precisely termed “Web commerce” — the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web via secure servers (note HTTPS, a special server protocol which encrypts confidential ordering data for customer protection) with e-shopping carts and with electronic pay services, like credit card payment authorizations.

When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security protocols (like HTTPS) to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed (during the browser wars of this period). Subsequently, between 1998 and 2000, a substantial number of businesses in the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary Web sites.

Although a large number of “pure e-commerce” companies disappeared during the dot-com collapse in 2000 and 2001, many “brick-and-mortar” retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. For example, after the collapse of online grocer Webvan, two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, both started e-commerce subsidiaries through which consumers could order groceries online.

As of 2005, e-commerce has become well-established in major cities across much of North America, Western Europe, and certain East Asian countries like South Korea. However, e-commerce is still emerging slowly in some industrialized countries, and is practically nonexistent in many Third World countries.

Electronic commerce has unlimited potential for both developed and developing nations, offering lucrative profits in a highly unregulated environment.

Hanif Khaki is the acclaimed author of numerous business related articles and is the founder of the popular e-commerce resource site http://www.ecommerce.extra-information.com

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