With over one billion people worldwide using the Internet, it's no wonder that so many businesses are turning online. Establishing a web business is not as simple as merely building a web site, however. Because Merchant Partners takes pride in helping our customers succeed, we have put together this list of seven features that we believe to be essential to ensuring your business's online success:

1. Hosting
2. Web Store
3. Shopping Cart
4. Payment Gateway
5. Merchant Account
6. Traffic
7. Metrics

The first three features on our list are intuitive-your web business wouldn't exist without them. But the other features are just as important, if not more so. As the commerce aspects of your online business, the fourth and fifth features make it possible for customers to purchase the products or services you sell and for you to receive their payment. The final two features, the promotion features, are the most frequently overlooked but are nonetheless vital to maintaining and expanding your customer base.

Click here to get more details about getting online and you will find a range of integrated solutions on our corporate website.

1. Hosting
While your web site design and content may have been created and developed on the computer in your office, your web site will not be available to the rest of the world over the Internet until it is stored on a host computer with a constant, high speed connection to the Internet. This hosting is necessary for making your site accessible to anyone connected to the Internet at any time.

Thousands of companies offer web hosting services, alleviating businesses of the expense of purchasing and maintaining their own additional equipment. Through our parent company, Innuity, Merchant Partners provides a complete range of business and ecommerce web sites that can either be self designed and managed or customized for your business by our team of professional designers. Follow the links to learn more about our business and ecommerce web sites or our custom design services. 

2. Web Store
The web store is the online equivalent of your brick and mortar store. Your site visitors come to the ecommerce storefront to see and search through the products you have to sell. The business and ecommerce web sites we offer through our parent company, Innuity, come complete with web store capabilities that are easy for you to manage and easy for your customers to navigate.

3. Shopping Cart
Just like your brick and mortar store needs a check out station with a cash register, your online customers need a way to purchase whatever they have come to buy. For online businesses, this "check out" ability comes in the form of an e commerce shopping cart. Customers should be able to add items to their virtual shopping cart just as they would in a physical store, and then proceed through the check out process when they are ready to purchase their desired items. All of our business and ecommerce web sites, provided through our parent company, Innuity, have shopping cart capabilities that are compatible with Merchant Partners' payment gateway services.

4. Payment Gateway
While the shopping cart is the actual medium for checking items out, a payment gateway is necessary for accepting and processing electronic payments from your customers. This gateway acts as a bridge between the customer and a financial institution, such as a credit card company. Merchant Partners provides all of the payment gateway services you need from fraud prevention and detection to recurring billing.

5. Merchant Account
A merchant account is needed in conjunction with the payment gateway if you intend to accept credit card payments online. A business establishes the account with a bank or other financial institution who agrees to pay for valid credit card transactions. In return, the bank collects the obligation owed by the customer. Credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard require all businesses to obtain a merchant account because it transfers the financial responsibility from the potentially unstable business to a firmly-established, financially dependable institution.

Merchant Partners specializes in helping online businesses establish online merchant accounts and provides these businesses with the additional merchant services they need to function effectively and profitably.

6. Traffic
Once your web store is officially established, the next stage is to drive qualified traffic to your web site. This requires optimizing the design and content of your web site so that it is more visible to search engines. Millions of people worldwide perform searches online every day, and many of them could be searching for the very products or services your business offers. If your name is the first they see instead of your competitors', you are likely to see a visible increase in sales. Many e-businesses don't have a monthly e-marketing budget as part of their business plan and even if they have a great product or service, it's very hard to succeed online without qualified traffic. For local advertising solutions, we have partnered with Yellow Page Guides and Innuity's LeadConnect to help reach qualified local customers.

Through our sister company, 10x Marketing, Merchant Partners provides online marketing services for businesses of all types and sizes. These services include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) campaign management, e-mail marketing, and more.

7. Metrics
In order to effectively maintain your current and expanding customer base, it's valuable to know what exactly visitors are doing when they come to your site. Knowing such information as how they got there, which pages they visited, and how much time they spent on your site, helps you identify which aspects of your site are effectively attracting customers and which ones are turning them away. Once identified, you can make whatever improvements are necessary to draw in and retain more customers.

This analysis is known in the ecommerce world as web analytics. Merchant Partners, through 10x Marketing, provides web analytics services. Our tools deliver access to the right information which is essential to making the decisions that will help you achieve your company's ecommerce objectives.