The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. The ecommerce website has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well, very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.
A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take the visitors money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of...