A good website will bring attention to your company, your brand, and your products. A great website will do all of this and allow people to functionally send money to your company, your brand, and your products as well! And the difference between the two may be as subtle as setting up the right e-commerce functionality.

Five ways to do this specifically, with today’s technological availability, include finding a way to accept credit cards, using PayPal’s potential, having direct shopping cart resources build into your web framework, using personalized communication, and organizing a way to purchase licenses (for software, for example).

1. Credit Card Acceptance

If you’re out at a physical location, and people want to buy your products, there are a few ways to handle it. There’s cash, there are checks, and there are credit cards. Each requires a different set of variables to make sure the transaction goes securely. But, one new, progressive development with credit cards is the availability of merchant accounts to bypass some of the infrastructure requirements of the past. And once you have those accounts set up, you can mention this in advertising your mobility as a seller.

2. PayPal Availability

And with more people using PayPal than ever, if you have your account there set up, people visiting your site online can hit a single button and have access to any number of different aspects of your product via secure e-commerce lanes. Whether you’re selling digital goods or physical ones, PayPal has excellent ways to cover both client and server side connections, with plenty of proof of purchase points along the way.

3. Direct Shopping Cart Resources

Within the constructs of your web hosting company, there are often ways to add shopping cart functionality right within that framework. Whatever content management system you end up using, there are various scripts that can work with your web code to make electronic shopping carts an easy addition to any kind of presentation you decide on.

4. Personalized Communication

Another way to add ecommerce to the mix is via personal communication. If you run a small or personalized enough site, you can have people send you emails detailing what they need, and you can invoice them personally. This is a good way to form a bond of trust between an individual producer and consumer as well.

5. Licensing Purchases

And for those of you who are selling software via your website, there are many different ways to provide free trial versions, and then sell some type of license through your website as well. This lets people work with the try-before-buy concept to see what kind of use they get from your product first.