What this means to you is that you can have the best of both worlds.  Not only can you or your staff can work on the same database, adding products, changing prices - and let's not forget about shipping orders - but, if you wish, you can deploy your database via an interactive website, where your customers can make inquiries, order your products, book accommodation or whatever your business entails - and do it there and then - in real time.

That's what we call the "front end". The "back end" is where you will have the ability to carry out all the stock control, accounting functions, ordering, financial management and costing that you would expect in your in-house software.

We used to develop our web based databases mainly under ASP.NET, using C# programming language and using Microsoft SQL Server databases.

However, frankly, other excellent database management systems and development tools are available.  In addition, many people don't wish to install the .NET framework.

As a result, we have been moving more and more to the use of PHP programming language and MySQL databases, which are Open Source products (so cost nothing to use) and don't require .NET to operate. In fact, they are built into the packages offfered by most hosting servers.