What are the different concepts in e-commerce templates that are useful to merchant affiliates?

For any merchant affiliate who owns a shopping cart on a website, it is very important to know and understand certain basic concepts related to the e commerce templates. Since these concepts have become popular in online merchant account usage and prove to be useful in the process, we have elaborated on these terms for your benefit.

There are five basic terms in the context of e commerce templates. They are:

Affiliate Marketing:

This term refers to a marketing system based online through which an affiliate is rewarded for channelizing customer traffic to the merchant’s site. This process entails that the merchant affiliate is paid a commission for securing online customers through a pay-per-click system or sometimes even a pay-per-action system. Such sites usually also appear in the form of shopping directories or platforms for price comparison.

Clicks and Mortar:

This term is commonly used to refer to a combination of an offline store in the traditional sense that has a considerable online presence. There are several offline stores today which have established their own e commerce shopping carts online. For newbies to this system of online marketing, a good idea would be to follow the expert strategies adopted by other successful ‘clicks and mortar’ stores like the Wal-Mart. This would not only help in understanding the latest advertising and PR skills, it would also help to achieve a credible department of customer service as well as a strong supplier base.

LSI:

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which refers to the popular process offered by Google. Through LSI, it is possible to determine the context of the page. This is done by Google’s mechanisms which check for all related terms in the web content, part from just the keywords. This means that stronger the association of semantics and meanings among words on the page, higher would be the net value for your page. Thus, if you are looking to build a web page for marketing through the e commerce templates, you must take efforts to bring it up to Google’s LSI standards.

Payment Gateway:

This concept is highly useful in the business of online merchant accounts, and helps to facilitate and confirm a real-time payment. When the customer makes a payment on an order for any product placed on your shopping cart website, it is through the payment gateway mechanism that his credit card transactions are processed. Such automatic processing of credit card payments is carried out either through the Application Programming Interface (API), which is a seamless integration, or it is also done by redirecting the customer to a site enabled by a payment gateway to make the payment.

Shopping cart software:

And finally, and most importantly, it is the e commerce software that makes possible the sale of goods through the internet. When you are starting your very own shopping cart website, it is necessary that you pay attention to the complete solution of e commerce templates to attract customers, calculate totals on orders, and process payments for customers.