E-commerce websites are websites that sell products and actually accept credit card, Paypal, or other forms of payment online. Web design for E-commerce is a very delicate matter. Your design has to guide your customer to the order button without ever losing his intention to buy.

E-commerce in its simplest form is the following:
You have a site to sell a product. On your order page you say: Send a check and when we cashed it we will send the product. Simple and straight-forward. But Internetters are impulsive buyers. They don't want to write down your data, go offline, write a check, send it to you and wait. They want it now without leaving the comfort of their homes.

E-commerce websites should include a shopping cart. This is a software program that lets your customer click on the products they want to buy and store them in a 'basket'. At the end of the shopping the basket shows the products bought including prices and grand totals.

If you are serious about ecommerce you must be able to accept credit cards. The majority of your visitors will use this way to pay for your products. So if you can't offer credit card payment, you will lose sales. There are two ways you can offer this service. The first one is to get a merchant account and accept credit cards yourself. The second way is easier. Use a third party to collect credit card payments for you.

Electronic commerce can be dangerous because customers provide online confidential (credit card) information. To secure that information it must be encrypted. Therefore you have to use a Secure Server to send encrypted data. Transmission takes a little bit longer because of the encryption. The technical term is SSL, Secure Sockets Layer, and is a protocol for authenticating and encrypting Internet traffic.