We have listed more features of osCommerce below:
Customer Functionality:

• Orders are stored in the database provided by your hosting service provider for expedited and efficient retrieval
• Customer can check the order status and history
• Multiple shipping and billing addresses can be maintained
• Temporary shopping cart is available for guests
• Search features are advanced and easy to use
• Enhance your shopping expecience with interactive product reviews
• SSL secured Transactions

Product Functionality:

• Product Descritption based on HTML
• Automatic displaying of specials
• Option to show out of stock products and are available for purchase
• Subscription to receive emails and newsletters

Payment Functionality:

• Various forms of offline payment processing like cheque and money orders are accepted.
• Online payment processing can be done by PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net and iPayment.
• You can disable certain payment services based on zone basis.

Shipping Functionality:

• Shipping modules are based on price, weight and destination
• Quotes for shipping services are available Real-Time basis
• Shipping services can be disabled according to the zone

Tax Functionality:

• Tax implementation is quite flexible according to state and country
• Different tax rates for different products

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If you are planning to make your store live on the Internet,it is necessary to host your website with a Web Hosting provider who offers support for E-commerce websites.With an ecommerce website, you can create your own custom store and sell products or services online.

Starting an ecommerce business is pretty simple.There is no high cost involved to start such a website.A well designed user friendly ecommerce website can generate revenue in no time.But,due to the ever growing competition over the Internet, having your website optimized is most essential.Below are few steps that can help to set-up a successful ecommerce website.

Choosing A Correct Niche
Finding and choosing the appropriate niche is the first steps towards setting up an eCommerce website.If you already have a business which involves selling products or services and you wish to lauch the same business online, Or if you are setting up a new online business, it is important that you get your website designed from a professional web developer.It is recommended to decide a niche of your personal interest. For example if you own or have interest in Computer Peripherals,Computer Games and accessories,you can start with selling them online using an eCommerce website.It is better to choose a niche that is most liked by you or you have a hobby of those things.This helps you add an extra effort when working on it which would take a leap ahead of your competitor.

Research About The Niche
Once you have jotted down few ideas of your interested niche,you must explore each of them a little deeper.You must carry out a research about how many people would be interested in your products or services? Where would be your targeted customers,with this it means from which geographic location you expect the customers to purchase your services? Get an average of the total search made by users about your products and services. It is better to decide the geo location of the targeted audience prior to the launch of your ecommerce website.

Analyse Your Competitors
It is very important to know your competitors.A thorough research about your competitors is very important.Ample time needs to be spent on studying your competitors website.Factors such as prices,services,products etc. needs to be closely monitored.You need to understand the steps that your competitor has taken to get better position than your website.

Decide a Proper Business Plan
Every thing has a goal, therefore before your website goes live, it is important that you have a well formulated business plan in place.Include the site Theme,Goals,Business Strategies and the Steps would be taking in future to lead your business to success.Prepare a chart that would describe your expenditure,sales,profits and other factors.This would prove helpful when you wish to make some tweaky changes to your strategy.Try to build a strategy that can boost your sales.

Website Creation
Now,once all the above mentioned points are in place, it is time to register a domain name that is most suitable or relevant to your niche. If your products are designed to target customers from across the globe, it is recommended to have a domain name with an extension “.com”, whereas if you are tergeting customers from The UK or India, you should get a domain registered with an extension .co.uk or .co.in respectively. Relevant keywords of your niche must be chosen when registering a domain name.
It is very important to create a good design to make a unique first impression.A well described product line is always appreciated by visitors and the search engines.

Shopping Cart
There are various shopping cart softwares offered by webhosting service providers.You may also opt to use a third party cart of your choice, but first you must get it confirmed from the Web Hosting service provider. You may take advice of the web host to choose an appropriate shopping cart for your products.

Gaining Exposure
Once you are done with registering a domain and ready with your ecommerce website, it is time to go online.In addition to all the above mentioned factors it is important that you choose an appropriate web hosting service provider.
Now arrives the most crucial part of promoting your website and gaining exposure.In short promoting your website over the Internet and the local market.

Please refer the following links to know more about online promotion techniques:
SEO and SEM effective for Boosting the Productivity.
Link Building : One of the Most Important factor of SEO.

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Web Hosting is not so old concept here in India.There are newer concepts and techniques being introduced in the industry of Web Hosting day-by-day.There is a large increase seen in the sector E-commerce services.It is important to be aware of various types of web hosting services offered by the Web Hosting providers.

Web Hosting Types and its explanation

There are numerous numbers of Web Hosting services offered by Web Hosting Providers, among those below are the four basic types of Server Hostings:

1.Dedicated Server Hosting
2.Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS Hosting)
3.Reseller Web Hosting
4.Shared Server Hosting

1.Dedicated Server Hosting: Different people refer Dedicated Server Hosting as Dedicated Internet Hosting, Dedicated Web Hosting, Dedicated Web Server Hosting etc. but they all mean the same. In this type of Web Hosting, web hosts offer two different types of dedicated hosting services namely Managed Dedicated Servers and Unmanaged Dedicated Server Hosting. In this type of hosting, the client is the sole owner of the server.They are allowed to use the server as per their requirements (as per the terms of service).You get complete admin access of the server. This type of service is more often opted by large websites and organisations.A dedicated server offers the optimum level of security over the Internet.A web hosting provider offers a basic server configuration as default,but upon request they can custimize it as per your requirements.

2.Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS Hosting): VPS Hosting is also referred as Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting (VDS). In this, using a virtualisation software Virtual Partitions are created on a physical server. Certain resources are allocated to each partition. A VPS shared similarity with Dedicated Server Hosting, as in this too you get root or admin access to the server. This only difference the amount of resources. A VPS is lot cheaper than Dedicated Server, hence is widely preferred for hosting website/s. Depending on the hosting provider, you can get flexible upgrade options with a VPS.Which means, when you are almost up with the allocated resources, you can contact the hosting provider and without any effort upgrade to a higher VPS that offers more resources.

3.Reseller Web Hosting : Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting in which the you do not have much privileges as that of a Dedicated server of VPS. This can be an ideal option for mid-sized websites that do not require much resources for its functionality.

4.Shared Web Hosting: Probably Shared Web Hosting is one of the widely used types of web hosting types. In this type of hosting there are multiple customer accounts set up on a single physical.The resources of a single physical server are shared by all the websites hosted on a server. This type of hosting service is ideal for small websites. By small websites,I mean websites that do not receive much traffic and hence the resources required are less. This type of web hosting is the cheapest types of hostings offered by web hosting provider.

There are basically two types of platforms offered by web hosting providers for the purpose of hosting your websites, namely Linux and Windows.

Other than the four basic types of Web Hosting services, there are numerous types of hosting offered. Below is a list of few:

a) Clustered Web Hosting: The clustering technology was developed to eliminate certain problems involved with Shared Web Hosting. This technology offers customers with cluster handling of security, load balancing etc.

b) Blog Hosting Service: Blogware or Weblog or blogging software is a type of software that consists of specialized form of Content Management System specifically designed for the creation and maintenance of blogs.

c)Image Hosting: An Image hosting service is offered by web hosting providers for the purpose of enabling users to upload and save images on the Internet. The host provides a dedicated server space of the server for you to save your images.

d)Video Hosting: In this type of hosting, you are alloted a bit higher server resources of the server than that of Image hosting account. Similar to Image hosting, you are provided with FTP account via which you can upload your videos to the server. You can then share your videos with individuals that are permitted by you.

e) E-mail Hosting: An E-mail hosting service is a type of hosting where an individual is offered a Web Mail service by web hosting service provider.

f) Game Server Hosting: Game server hosting is one of the most preferred type of web hosting types these days.There are more and more people that are signing up for these servers due to the ever increasing boom in the gaming industry. By leasing such a server you are capable of installing a computer game of your choice onto the server, this enables you to multiplayer gaming. With a game Server you get web based tools to help control and configure the servers.

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Hosting an E-commerce website is fairly simple. There are multiple benefits of choosing an eCommerce web hosting solution offered by web hosting providers. They offer robust, reliable, relatively inexpensive hosting packages. Along with the web hosting package you can avail a combination of different shopping cart technologies, integration of payment gateways, easy installation scripts and most importantly the anytime support.

It might be confusing for some people to choose an appropriate web hosting service provider due to the lack of basic knowledge of web hosting. You may go through the following link to understand the basics of hosting.

While choosing a eCommerce web hosting service provider, it is important to check for certain aspects. It’s a common trend that we avoid to choose a host that makes us do most of the stuff by ourselves. We usually want things that are pre-existing and easily available. Hence, while choosing an eCommerce host, you must check if they offer easy installations (one click installation is more preferred). They should offer a wizard that can take you through the installation process, else it can prove to be a frustrating task.

They must offer choice of eCommerce templates, preferably customizable templates are of preference. A reputed web hosting provider would never say, that they do not offer or allow customized templates.

They must allow you to build a catalog of your own. You should be enabled to export or import your pre-existing data as it would be a hard time for you if you have to manually keep typing the content each time you switch hosts.

Your task does not end here. Once, you are done with building your store, the crucial task of marketing follows. Some hosting providers offer these services as well. It is important that the hosting provider offers an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate as well for online security.

PayPal, GoogleCheckout, 2Checkout, Moneybookers etc are some of the most secure online payment gateways. You can integrate any of these with your website. A web hosting provider should provider multiple payment gateways.

It is necessary that the web hosting provider offers service, post sales support alongwith web hosting. Today, newer eCommerce technologies are being introduced, the web host must be competent enough to meet those requirements and offer.

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