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One of the fastest growing sectors of the Web is eCommerce. People are becoming accustomed to buying things from Web store fronts and every year the volume and value of sales increases substantially. If you would like to open up your own eCommerce website here are a few basics to get you started.

The first thing you need, obviously, is a product or service that you can sell. If you already have a brick and mortar store you can offer the same items for sale on a website. The number of products that you sell is a giant factor in the type of hosting package you need. If you have let’s say less than 20 items, you could set the whole thing up on a small hosting account. Listing hundreds of products is a different story – you will probably need more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features such as databases as well as a secure connection for accepting payments.

Since the key part of eCommerce is getting paid, let’s look at the various payment options available. There's three basic options – collecting payment information directly or hiring a third-party service to method credit cards.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
If you are planning to get or already have a merchant account that enables you to method credit cards you need to have a website with a secure connection. This provides a way to encrypt sensitive information so that it cannot be intercepted and read as it travels across the Web. If you don’t have a secure connection (indicated by https at the start of a web address) forget about collecting credit card numbers – customers are web savvy to post sensitive financial information on an unsecured website.

Third Party Gateways
If all this sounds complicated, you have the option of going with a third party service that handles financial transactions for you. To complete a sale, customers are usually redirected to the net site of the payment service where they provide their credit card details. A quantity of these services have setup fees and charge a commission on each sale, while others (like PayPal) are free to set up and basically take a percentage of each sale.

In order to receive a secure connection, you need to apply for an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. These are issued by companies such as Thawte which need you to supply verifiable information concerning your identity and location. Three time you have the certificate it must be installed on your website. For this you need to have a one-of-a-kind IP address – available at an extra cost from most web hosts. There may also be a fee to install the certificate.

Shopping Carts
Shopping carts are scripts that can be installed in your hosting account. They can automate the whole eCommerce experience by organizing your products in to categories, generating pages that describe categories as well as individual items, let you keep track of returning clients, suggest other items for the customer to buy before they check out, and permit them rate the products they have bought.

Shopping carts can provide a more satisfying shopping experience while providing a structure for your online business. Lots of hosting packages include free shopping cart scripts such as Miva, Agora, osCommerce, and Zen. When choosing an eCommerce package, make sure it supports your preferred method of payment gateway. For example, if you already have a merchant account with your local bank, use that as your beginning point for choosing a shopping cart which supports that particular payment method.

1 comments

jade said... @ March 7, 2015 at 3:40 PM

Listing hundreds of products is a different story – you will probably need more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features such as databases as well as a secure connection for accepting payments. ecommerce website hosting

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