E-commerce

E-commerce is selling your products online through a system that takes the order and the payment for you. The customer chooses what they want, sees the total, picks how to pay and how to receive it, and confirms. Nobody has to be awake for that to happen. The difference between e-commerce and selling through Messenger is not the internet, it is whether the sale can complete without a person on your side of the conversation.

In short

• E-commerce means the order and the payment happen without you in the middle.
• Your own store and a marketplace like Shopee or Lazada solve different problems.
• Cash on delivery is still normal here, and it changes how you plan.
• Most stores lose sales at checkout, not on the product page.

The four things every online store needs

• A catalogue. Your products, with real photos, honest descriptions, variants such as size or colour, and stock levels that reflect what is actually in the stockroom. It sits on a website you control, which is what separates it from a marketplace listing.
• A cart and a checkout. Where the customer confirms what they are buying, gives a delivery address and picks a payment method. This is where most stores lose people, and it is the part that gets the least attention.
• A payment method. In the Philippines that usually means several: GCash, Maya, bank transfer, card, and cash on delivery. Each one is handled by a payment gateway, which checks the payment and passes the money to your account.
• Delivery. Which couriers, which areas, how long, and what the customer is told after they order. Silence between order and arrival is the single most common reason a first time buyer does not come back.

What actually happens when somebody buys

It helps to see the sequence, because every step is a place a sale can be lost and a place something can be measured.

A visitor arrives, usually from search, an ad or a social post. They look at a product page. They add to cart. They start checkout, enter an address, choose a payment method, and confirm. Your system reserves the stock, takes or records the payment, and sends a confirmation. The order is picked, packed and handed to a courier. The customer gets tracking. The parcel arrives, or in the case of cash on delivery, is accepted or refused at the door.

Only at that last point is the sale complete. Everything before it is a commitment, not money. This is why sellers who count orders rather than delivered orders are often surprised at the end of the month.

Your own store, or Shopee and Lazada

They are not the same business, and most sellers eventually run both.

A marketplace brings you traffic. People are already browsing Shopee and Lazada with their wallets open, and you do not have to teach them how to check out. Their sale events pull enormous volume through on the double dates. In exchange you compete on one screen with every other seller of the same thing, the marketplace owns the customer relationship, and you follow their rules on promotions and fees.

Your own store gives you the opposite trade. Nobody arrives unless you bring them, through search, ads or your Facebook page. But you keep the customer list, you decide how the brand looks, you are not one row among near identical sellers, and you can build repeat business directly.

The usual pattern for a Philippine seller is a marketplace shop for volume and discovery, and an own store for the customers who already know the brand and buy again. The mistake is treating the marketplace as permanent. It is rented ground, and the rent is a share of every sale plus the customer’s name.

Cash on delivery, and what it does to your numbers

For plenty of buyers here, cash on delivery is what makes a first order possible at all, and a shop that drops it loses those orders rather than converting them to card payments.

The consequence to plan for is that a COD order is not a completed sale until somebody accepts it at the door. Reported sales and actual sales are therefore two different numbers, and the gap belongs on a report rather than in a surprise. It affects cash flow too, since the stock and the delivery are paid for before the money arrives, so a growing business can be busier and shorter of cash at once.

Prepaid orders through GCash, Maya or card do not have those problems, which is why most sellers try to move buyers towards prepaid over time. The way that works is not pressure, it is trust: reviews, a real address, real photos, and a returns policy somebody actually wrote.

Why checkout is where stores bleed

Nearly every store loses more people at checkout than anywhere else. The pattern has a name, cart abandonment, and the reasons repeat across almost every store.

• Forced account creation. Somebody wanted one item and is now being asked to invent a password. Offer guest checkout.
• Surprise charges at the end. Shipping that appears only on the final screen feels like a trick even when it is not. Show it earlier.
• Too many fields. Every field you can drop is a field that cannot be filled in wrong on a phone.
• No visible payment options. If the buyer cannot see GCash or COD before starting, some will leave to check rather than continue.
• A checkout that fights the phone. Small tap targets, a keyboard that covers the field, a form that clears itself when the connection drops. Most of your buyers are on a phone on mobile data, and the checkout is the least forgiving screen on the site.
• Nothing after the order. No confirmation, no tracking, no message. The customer assumes something went wrong, and messages you, which was the work you were trying to avoid.

Words you will hear, and what they mean

• SKU. A code for one specific sellable item, including the variant. A shirt in three sizes and two colours is six SKUs, not one product.
• Payment gateway. The service that verifies a payment and moves it to your account.
• Merchant of record. Whoever is legally the seller in the transaction. On a marketplace it may not be you, which affects receipts and returns.
• Fulfilment. Everything after the order: picking, packing, dispatch, tracking.
• Abandoned cart. A basket somebody filled and did not pay for. The narrower case, where they had already started paying, is checkout abandonment.
• Conversion rate. The share of visitors who buy.
• Chargeback. A card payment reversed by the buyer’s bank after the fact.

What to measure

You cannot improve a store you cannot see. The numbers worth watching are the plain ones.

• Conversion rate tells you whether your problem is traffic or the store itself. A store with plenty of visitors and few orders does not need more advertising.
• Average order value is what a typical order is worth. Bundles and related product suggestions move it.
• Cart abandonment is how many filled baskets never became orders, and checkout abandonment is the narrower and more painful share of it. High abandonment points at the checkout, not the product.
• Delivered rate, which matters more here than in prepaid markets. Orders placed minus orders refused at the door.
• Repeat purchase rate is the share of customers who come back. It is the number most sellers never look at and the one that decides whether the business grows or just keeps running.

Getting these to report honestly is tracking, and it has to be set up deliberately before the numbers mean anything. A store that has been running for a year without it can tell you what it sold, but not why.