An extremely important aspect while choosing a e-commerce host is the uptime, which means the time when your website would be available to the visitors. Apparently if a host is offering a 90% uptime guarantee, it means you website can actually be down for almost 36 days in a year! Never settle for anything less than 98%. Your store front being available to your customer 24 hrs/seven days is the most important aspect of your e-commerce web site and to ensure that you have but to choose a quality host.

A quality e-commerce web hosting should have the following features:

· <a href="http://www.serverplex.com/merchantaccounts.html">Internet Merchant account solutions</a>

· Credit Card Processing and Payment Gateway services

· Merchant Accounts for Internet,

· Virtual terminal for key entered Mail Order/Phone Order sales

· Retail and Auction businesses facility

· Integration of different shopping carts & software systems

· Online reporting and real time transaction management

· 24 hr technical supports and availability of the user manuals

· Facility to integrate your ASP-based enterprise e-business database, dynamic content and commerce management software in an open application server environment.

Managing an e-business could be one of the easiest thing to do if you initially do a good amount of research and planning to have your e-commerce website designed, developed and hosted in the most professional manner.

<a href="http://www.serverplex.com/webdesign.html">Ecommerce website design</a> plays an integral role for getting long-term business benefits from your site. The success of your e-business depends on a large extent on how well your site performs and accomplishes the various business related tasks to meet the financial goals. Most of the search engine experts agree that e-commerce web design can greatly affect performance & visibility in the organic search engine results.

To summarize, the special e-commerce web design features you can look for in your e commerce web site should include the following:

· Quickly organize your products (including additions) at your storefront or home page

· Create product categories, catalog items, and upload pictures of your products.

· Process sales orders, enter tracking numbers, and send instant email confirmations to the customers and the concerned staff.

· Keep accurate records of your customers and their orders.

· Create reports that track sales and site usage.

· Track inventory levels for all the products in your store.

· Update product information using rapid entry screens for speed and efficiency.

· Export your sales information in industry standard formats compatible with popular accounting packages.

· Your website is compatible with most major credit card payment processing solutions

· Integrated product search page.

· Built in modular fashion, allowing for free future upgrades and addition of new features.

E-commerce Web Marketing

Your E commerce web site can have facility to create, schedule, and send highly effective, personalized email marketing campaigns that reflect your branding and image at a fraction of the cost of traditional media. Many e-commerce web hosting providers offer you extensive library of colorful eye-catching templates, and facility to create messages with your own themes and styles. Now-a-days, the advanced e-commerce web hosting solutions and web marketing packages have the viral marketing features included as a part of your e-commerce web site promotion. Viral Marketing:

Viral marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth with the exposure it get to the professionally created messages, it encompasses the following tools:

1 Loyalty Building Tools

· Adding the personal touch to your business communications is now possible with triggered auto-emailing event reminders like (Birthdays, warranties, anniversaries etc.)

· Leverage your current customer base to advertise for you by providing them by providing ‘refer to a friend link.’

· An Invite Tool has the capacity to take "viral marketing" and ‘email marketing to new heights. It lets your patrons play "host" at your establishment for arranging an event and invite a large number of people participate in it.

2 Survey Creation Tools

These tools allow you have the ability to collect names, email addresses, and profile information from the people who visit your website. With these tools you can build your own survey/ sign-up-forms using a without any HTML experience required! All subscriber information is automatically segmented and delivered to your secure and proprietary database.

For a busy e-commerce web site, dedicated servers with a number of windows and Linux web hosting plans only can provide you with the best service. If looking for affordable e-commerce web hosting; virtual web hosting is the perfect choice which provides better control than the shared environment and saves you from some of the worries of dedicated servers.