Ecommerce is an umbrella term used to describe all the transactions that take place on the Internet. In the Internet marketing scenario, this is definitely a very useful term. The buying and selling routes that you will have to set up on your commercial website will need to be done through an ecommerce solution. This is actually a software program that can provide you various features according to your needs.

In order to have an ecommerce solution on your website, you will need to hire a suitable ecommerce hosting service. These ecommerce hosting services handle various tasks right from building the ecommerce website to helping with the credit card processing, providing payment gateway integration services and adding shopping carts to the website.

The following are the top 10 ecommerce hosting sites in the world today:-
Go EMerchant (http://goEmerchant.com/)
3DCart (http://www.3dCart.com/)
Volusion (http://www.volusion.com/)
Core Commerce (http://www.corecommerce.com/)
Yahoo Merchant (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/)
ProStores (http://www.prostores.com/)
Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com/)
GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart (http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ecommerce/cart.asp/)
PrecisionWeb (http://www.precisionweb.net/)
Fortune3 (http://www.fortune3.com/)

Your ecommerce solution is not just for the convenience that it provides. There are many other things it involves, which are crucial to your business.

The first important thing is the shopping cart feature. This is where any member of your website can add the products they are interested in. Shopping carts can “hold” various products till the person makes the payment. Thus, if a person wants to check out your entire product range before making the purchase, you don’t have to worry that they will forget to buy the first ones they saw.

Also, the encryption is a very important thing. Since people will be using their credit cards here, it is the responsibility of the site developer to make sure that their identities are not ripped off. Most ecommerce sites use 128 bit SSL protection, though some ecommerce solutions could provide a much higher value of encryption.