4. Fitness for purpose:
1. Providing an easy and secured way for customers to effect transactions. Credit cards are the most popular means of sending payments on the internet, accounting for 90% of online purchases. In the past, card numbers were transferred securely between the customer and merchant through independent payment gateways. Such independent payment gateways are still used by most small and home businesses. Most merchants today process credit card transactions on site through arrangements made with commercial banks or credit cards companies.
2. Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
3. Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer. However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.
4. Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies -- the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can appear either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)
5. Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes (but remembering that the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).
6. It provides an attractive website. The tasteful use of color, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage has aided in success in this respect.
7. Provides a complete understanding of the products or services offered which not only includes complete product information, but also sound advisors and selectors.