Internet has opened a new era of business opportunities. Each day, thousands of new consumers are joining the Internet. More and more companies are adopting Internet as their primary sales and distribution channel. According to Forrester Research -The survey of 130 U.S. companies indicates consumers spent $76 billion shopping on-line in 2002. This represents a 48 percent increase over 2001, and projections for 2003 come close to $100 billion, representing 4.5 percent of total retail sales.

As a business you probably understand that in order to stay competitive you must integrate ecommerce to your present business strategy. A little research will show you that there is an extensive array of technology and solutions for enterprise and web store building available in the market. You also perceive that ecommerce sites can cost you from a mere couple of hundred bucks to hundreds of thousand of dollars. How to choose something from so many options that will exactly fit your present need?

Although, this might look like a daunting task, a little preparation will definitely help you taking the right decision in your quest for an appropriate ecommerce solution. To understand your requirement better and create a proper ecommerce strategy, you have to ask yourself a number of questions. Below I jotted down some of the questions that, hopefully, will spur your imagination.

• What should be the look of my web store?

• Do I need a database for my product catalog?

• How should the purchase order generate on my web store?

• Do I need to handle different pricing system for dealers, wholesalers and end customers?

• How do I bill my customers?

• How easy can I make my web store to navigate?

• How many search options should we have?

• Can I show my customers a product comparison table?

• What should be my merchant account gateway system?

• Finally, how much should I invest to build my web store?

If building an ecommerce site from scratch feels too overwhelming to you and you are a small business, my suggestion is - to build a web store with one of the providers similar to Yahoo, Bigstep, Rusbiz etc.

The web stores that you can build directly on the Internet have all the necessary features like shopping cart, product catalog and payment gateway as any regular ecommerce site. In most of the cases, you construct web store online from templates and easy-to-use editor and you hardly need to know html or other script languages.

You can order your Web Store from Rusbiz right now.

The benefits of using a web store that you can build online are enormous.

Quick to build: If you have all the materials handy, you can build a web store within a day.

Easy in use: You don