Ecommerce How To

[tm1274]

My company has a couple of websites, one of which only has 3 items that we would like to sell online. We have sold around a million of these items into a certain industry since the products conception about 15 years ago and all of these sa;es were because of mailings and phone calls. Can anyone point me in the right direction to setup a shopping cart, more specifically I don't understand Merchant accounts, and the fees associated with them. I guess what I am looking for would be a "How To" for selling online, maybe something that tells me what I need and maybe where to find it? I have a couple of shopping carts that I can use, Agora and Ecommerce. I am not sure that I need anything this to sell 3 products. We have calls daily from other countries wanting to place orders and would like to set up something simple that would work internationally and maybe have shipping rates. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[zippee]

Hi, my company run online shopping cart that may fit your requirement. See www.basket2go.net or if you want a complete store solution then www.store2go.net.

If you are going to develop your own shopping cart, you can do it through server side script like ASP and PHP. For ASP see www.asp101.com and for PHP try www.hotscripts.com. Although it is possible to program a shopping cart using client side javascript, but it lack of flexibility and speed.

All the best.

[Corey Bryant]

Since you have only three products, a smaller cart might be more worthwhile, unless you want some more things, like affiliates, possibly Fed-Ex / UPS real-time quotes?

Sit down and determine what you want the cart to have and what language (ASP, .NET, PHP). Then build your site and get that part up and running.

Then you will be ready for a merchant account and an electronic payment gateway (Verisign's Payflow, LinkPoint, Authorizenet.com). The electronic payment gateway is similiar to the POS terminal in the commissary. It connects your website to the transaction processor (usually First Data) and then First Data either handles the authorization or sends it over to the appropriate financial institution (Visa / MasterCard / AmEx / Discover) for authorization. And once it is approved or not, it comes back to your website. (Yes a lot happens when you hit that submit button :) )

The merchant account processor (MAP) helps you to accept the credit cards and handles getting your money from the issuing bank.

There are a lot of fees charged by the MAP - like discount rate, transaction rate (some gateways charge for transaction rates as well: Verisign's Payflow Pro gives you 1,000 free transactions, Auhtorizenet.com usually charges about $.10 a transaction and LinkPoint does not charge anything), electronic gateway fee, and customer service / statement fee for starters

[nullvariable]

osCommerce is a great free open source project that I have used on several sites successfully. I would highly recommend it. Fairly easy to setup and use. As a side note my company designs and hosts these types of sites, pm if interested.

NV

[edi2005]

We have over 15 years experience in Merchant Account and Processing Solutions, and have recently announced Free models to most clients. You can review our site to see what we can do for you, and we also have many other sites that can explain in furhter details any of your questions. Please review; http://wpn.freemerchantsource.com & http://www.freecreditcardprocessing.com as well. Please reply if there are any other questions about us, our company or our services.

[a12c4magic]

I too recommend OsCommerce as I myself use it and you can't go wrong when it doesn't cost you anything.

[mosquito]

I too recommend OsCommerce, althouth i am not use that!