Think of an e-commerce website as a storefront for products and/or services that you want to sell online. Your job is to convert your website visitor into actual buyers. You need to have plenty of appealing content and products on your site to attract search engines as well as to inform prospective clients.

Here are the main parts of an e-commerce site:

The online product catalog is the main place to store and manage the information about products or collections of products.

The shopping cart is a familiar interface buyers use to select products they want to buy. The shopping cart just holds information about the products that your customer is about to purchase and assists them with the checkout process.

The checkout system collects necessary payment information from the buyer, including shipping & billing addresses and credit card information or details of other payment mechanisms. It may also be configured to present shipping rates, taxes, coupons, or calculate other changes to arrive at the final price.

The payment gateway is a secure service that transfers payment and credit card information from your website to a merchant account provided by a bank or financial institution that handles online transactions. The gateway mechanism also handles any feedback from the bank, such as when a buyer has insufficient funds or is using an invalid credit card. The payment gateway is also tasked with validating that the credit card actually belongs to the user.

The merchant account is a special bank account that allows your website to accept online payments by debit or credit cards. Merchant account banks charge variable fees per transaction and transaction types, partially based on the bank’s assumption of risk to collect money on your behalf.

Finally, fulfillment is when the order is processed through the e-commerce website and results in a completed order that is shipped out.