Get an ecommerce storefront with your website from Secure Independence. Ecommerce is the means of selling goods on the Internet, using web pages. This involves much the same processes as selling goods elsewhere, but in a digital format. Presentation, placement, display, stocking, selling and payment are all familiar concepts, ecommerce demands that all this be done on screen, and as an automated process. To sell ecommerce goods, you must display them. Ecommerce approaches this in much the same way as a catalogue. Goods are presented as images with text descriptions, prices and product options. The main difference is in the way that ecommerce goods are stored and placed. Any ecommerce definition would have to include an understanding of databases. Instead of "printing" each product web page uniquely, only one page is made, and filled in by a database. This means that instead of a thousand pages for a thousand products, one page only is used - called an template. The ecommerce template has empty places in it that are filled in from the database. The information needed to call the right information into the place holders is contained in the link to the product. The links themselves are usually generated from an database. If you have a cutlery product line on a site selling tableware, then a piece of hidden code calls all the record sets in the cutlery section of the database until it has built links for them all. In this way, you only have to edit the e-commerce database to change your product lines on the website. Add a new piece of cutlery to the e-commerce database, and next time the links are called there will be twenty one instead of twenty. Obviously you cannot turn the web pages over like a printed catalogue, so it is necessary to create a e-commerce navigation system. Typically the first set of links will be e-commerce product categories and will build a list of individual items in that category, as e-commerce links. These e-commerce links in turn will call the exact product within the e-commerce template page. This system is called drilling down.