eCommerce continues to be a promising alternative, commercially. Regardless of economic conditions, eCommerce continues to expand. It is a profitable enterprise, and it is possible that you can earn a living with it once you become a success at it.
What type of merchandise should you market? Select a type of merchandise that you are very familiar with. For those who are creative, you could consider marketing craft supplies on the web.
Making arrangements:
1. You have to have a domain name.
(a) Stay away from hyphenated domain names (it’s too easy for people to forget the hyphen and end up on another site).
(b) Select a .com “TLD” if you can. If the .com version is not available, and you select .net or .biz instead, visitors are quite likely to type in .com out of habit, and not go to your site.
2. You have to have hosting. The server that your website is published to is called a “host” or “Web host”. Don’t be careless about the hosting company you select. There are a lot of discount services available. But as with anything in life, there is no free lunch. Also, if you want people to be able pay on your site, directly, your host must let you have a dedicated IP address and you will need to buy an SSL certificate.
3. It will be necessary to get eCommerce software (“shopping cart” software). A top quality brand is OSCommerce. It’s not difficult to learn, and it is free. OSCommerce offers themes (also known as skins or templates). Another easy to learn and free option is ZenCart. Zen Cart (and their loyal users) also offers many themes. A PHP programmer will be necessary to make any big changes to either of these. In addition, if you need a very robust eCommerce package, you may have to hire a programmer for installation and configuration of the more powerful OSCommerce packages. This means potentially a very big outlay of money. And most of these large “shopping cart” programs cannot work with a shared hosting plan, because there is an extensive server resource requirement, so you can expect to may more for dedicated or VPS hosting
4. The requirements for accepting payment. You will need a payment gateway and a “merchant” account. It is really not feasible to operate an eCommerce site unless you will accept credit cards. In the event that you obtain (or already have) a merchant account, you need to be sure your bank accepts web-based credit card payments. While the majority will, there are those that won’t.
Would you rather not fuss with a merchant account and gateway? There is a solution for all of this. Paypal simplifies everything. They offer the payment gateway and merchant account combined, and they provide all the security functionality on their website. 2Checkout is another gateway where all of the checkout is handled on their own secure site. It doesn’t matter what method you use — whether you make the arrangements for the merchant account by yourself, or choose Paypal, you will have to give the gateway a portion of the purchase cost. Usually, Paypal will cost more. If your products can’t handle more than a tiny markup, plan on having to do all of the required work yourself. A good network to accept payments directly on your site is authorize.net and every shopping cart I noticed include plug-ins so authorize.net can be used. You will require a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for authorize.net
Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. If you are looking for a Houston web site designer, look no further. If you need a few changes to your current site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance whether we host your site or not.