What do i need?

[Saima]

I have a night garments website. Wants to enhance it to online store website. What do i need to do for that? Which shopping cart? What about receiving online payments? How to do CGI scripting for shopping cart?

[TheWebDoctor(tm)]

Hello Saima and welcome to the forums.

I have a night garments website. Wants to enhance it to online store website. What do i need to do for that? Which shopping cart? What about receiving online payments? How to do CGI scripting for shopping cart?

In order to accept credit cards online you will need a merchant account and I highly recommend an online gateway to process the credit card payments. However, you can start with a PayPal account if that is outside your budget.

The merchant account services I would recommend you check into can be found at http://www.emerchantsgroup.com. They have really good rates. I formerly sold merchant accounts to my clients, but now I simply direct them to eMerchants Group for their assistance.

What shopping cart to use depends upon how serious your want to be. There are many shopping carts out there and many of them I have found lack what I was looking for when I developed the my search engine friendly shopping cart.

If you choose to use PayPal, we do include support for that payment method. If you wish to use Authorize.net or Verisign PayFlow Link as your online gateway (the two most popular online gateways).

CGI-based shopping carts are archaic and fail to meet my high standards for online commerce. In fact, one of the problems with CGI-based shopping carts comes into play when some search engines ignore the CGI-BIN directory because of all the challenges those URLs create for them. People have, for years, developed pages outside the CGI-BIN which link to the categories and items within the CGI-BIN directories. This actually increases the cost of ownership for the site and then very often requires search engine optimization to get you to the tops of the search engine results.

If you have time, click on the link in my signature and give me a call. If you like you can also visit http://www.harmonicasandstuff.com or http://www.healthypooch.com.

I hope this helps you.

[Corey Bryant]

I do have a free ASP shopping cart script if you are interested - just let me know & I will be happy to send it over. It does maintain inventory & it will also use size / colors. You can also check out www.spidersales.com for a more advance shopping cart script

Otherwise, if you prefer PHP, check out: http://oscommerce.snappyserver.com/ - they will help get you set up with oscommerce, hosting, etc.