Pet care begins at home... Having dreamt of running a small local business providing pet care at home our client engaged us to work with them to develop and promote their business idea. Having agreed a company name, logo and slogan the new business was online within five days.

Two months on and the small local business has a growing customer base who regularly visit the Petalone website. As new customers use the service they pass details to their friends and neighbours who by way of the website have access to the services, pricing, gallery and customer weblog where they can read some of the comments left by members of its client base.

Leading Supplier of Veterinary Instruments.. StarbroVet a leading UK supplier of high quality veterinary surgical instruments is one of the latest weBalyzer clients.

Prior to its positioning on the web StarbroVet did most of its sales and marketing through mail shots and advertising. Because its potential cutomer base was spread throughout the UK this was costly and difficult to maintain when new products and prices were introduced.

Electronic commerce or eCommerce is about setting your business on the Internet, allowing visitors / customers to access your website, and go through a virtual catalogue of your products / services online. When a visitor wants to buy something he/she likes, they merely, "add" it to their virtual shopping basket.

Items in the virtual shopping basket can be added or deleted, and when they're all set to checkout...they head to the virtual checkout, which has their complete list of items and total. At the virtual checkout your customers will be asked for their name, address etc. and method of payment (usually via credit card). Once they have entered all this information (which is transmitted securely) they can then just wait for delivery.

eCommerce is a term for any type of business, or commercial transaction, that involves the transfer of information across the Internet. It covers a range of different types of businesses, from consumer based retail sites, through auction or music sites, to business exchanges trading goods and services between corporations. It is currently one of the most important aspects of the Internet to emerge.

Ecommerce allows consumers to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance. Electronic commerce has expanded rapidly over the past five years and is predicted to continue, or even accelerate. In the near future the boundaries between "conventional" and "electronic" commerce will become increasingly blurred as more and more businesses move sections of their operations onto the Internet.

eCommerce websites utilizing shopping cart functionality are used to allow consumers to purchase goods and or services and will allow the site owner to track customers, and tie together all aspects of ecommerce into one cohesive whole.

The image is one of an invisible shopping cart. You enter an online store, see a product that fulfils your demand and you place it into your virtual shopping basket. When you are through browsing, you click checkout and complete the transaction by providing payment information.

eCommerce websites can start from very simple beginnings for instance a client keen on photography could have a hobby website where they display some of their better images for viewing and possibly download. As time goes by the site becomes popular and our client realizes he could sell copies of his pictures for a nominal amount of money rather than currently for free. This could either move to a new site developed from scratch, or take the existing web site and add some basic ecommerce shopping cart capabilities.

eCommerce sites can vary in size from very simple where product lines could be a single specialist item which is fairly static in terms of product change to a very complex site selling hundreds of unique items that change daily.

As you move into eCommerce you need a means of accepting online payments. This usually entails obtaining a merchant account and accepting credit cards through an online payment gateway. For smaller or startup sites a simpler method of accepting payments would be something such as PayPal.

Choosing the best shopping cart solution and payment processing method is something we will guide you through and is entirely dependant on your requirements and how you want to start the move into eCommerce.