What You Need to do Business
by Dave Summits
Are you ready to do business online? There are many things that
you need to make sure you have, to ensure flexibility and
security for your online store. In this article, we will outline
the basics of bringing your business online.
Shopping Cart Software There are several different solutions
that you should consider for your shopping cart software that we
will go over here. First off, you can open a Yahoo Store. This
is a good solution for people without much technical knowledge,
and doesn't take too much to set up. However, you need a lot of
flexibility, you should probably consider another solution. My
personal favorite is osCommerce. This is an open source (so its
free!) shopping cart solution with a big, very active community
to help you out along the way. Your host will need to have PHP
and MySQL for osCommerce to function. It is very simple to run
an unmodified version of osCommerce. You just download it,
upload it to your server, and run the web-based install, or if
you have Fantastico, you can automatically install it from
there. There is a web-based administration backend allowing you
to add products to your store and edit configuration settings.
There are many contributions that you can install to customize
your store, but minimal knowledge of PHP is needed. I think that
osCommerce is a great solution for many people. Another popular
shopping cart is Miva Merchant Pro. Unlike osCommerce, this one
isn't free, but there are hosts who can license it to you at a
monthly rate. This can be a very costly solution, but they do
have many very happy users of the program. There is a clean GUI
(graphical user interface) and a nice administrative backend.
Both osCommerce and Miva Merchant Pro require you to find a web
host, but with Yahoo Stores you are hosted directly by Yahoo.
Merchant Account This is a necessity of any ecommerce business,
because you need to be able to take payment in your store. There
are several different ways you can go here. You can either go
with a 3rd party processor, or a true merchant account which is
built into your shopping cart. The most well-known 3rd party
processors are Paypal and 2CheckOut. If you are going with
Paypal, I would strongly recommend you have another payment
processor as well. There are many users who won't buy from
someone who only accepts Paypal, but then again there are users
who would only go with someone who accepted Paypal. Personally,
I'd recommend using Paypal and a merchant account. A merchant
account makes your store a lot more professional, and gives you
more flexibility. There is a unique company that you can get a
merchant account from called ProPay. You get a "virtual credit
card terminal" and there are no monthly fees, just a low annual
fee.
Web Host If you have a website, you need a web host! For most
shopping carts, you will need PHP and MySQL, so make sure that
you look for hosts that support the technology that you need. If
you go with a Yahoo Store, your hosting is taken care of by
Yahoo. If you choose osCommerce, Miva Merchant Pro, or another
shopping cart program, you will need to find a web host. If you
plan on collecting credit cart numbers directly on your website,
you will need a SSL certificate. To have a SSL certificate, you
need a dedicated IP address. Most hosts will offer you a
dedicated IP address for an extra monthly price. You can get a
SSL certificate for $29.99 at GoDaddy (http://godaddy.com).
About the author:
Dave Summits is very knowledgable in the field of web hosting.
He writes articles for Web Hosting Insider - News
and Resources.
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Shopping Carts
WEBMASTERCART ™ is a flexible shopping cart software and catalog manager for Unix, Linux, Windows or Mac OS X servers. Customization features make our software the preferred e-commerce solution for webmasters and web developers worldwide. It is hosted at your website and can be easily installed and administrated without requiring any CGI programming skills.
WGS Store- eStore Shopping Cart Software
WGS-Store is a PHP/MySQL driven catalog
that will allow you to dynamically add as many
catagories and products to your site through an
easy to use web based administration panel. You
can upload pictures, as well as use HTML for the
display of your products on the page. Easy
integration with Paypal makes this solution
unbeatable for small sites or webmasters selling
few products.
Shopping Cart Os Commerce php wgs store scriptsThe Well Known osCommerce PHP Shopping Cart! However This Is NOT The Snapshot Version! This Is The MILESTONE RELEASE!
osCommerce is quickly becoming the shopping cart of choice for many online merchants! This script is simply AWESOME! You can literally have a store set up and ready to take orders within an hour! The script comes with a VERY easy to use admin section where you add all of the products, manage customers, shipping, tax, payment process, inventory, and just so much more to mention! You can use MANY, MANY different payment gateways with osCommerce including PayPal, 2Checkout, authorize.net, and many more! This version of the script is NOT simply the snapshot version THIS IS THE MILESTONE RELEASE!Add a shoppong cart to your website.
A PayPal Store Shopping Cart:Free with Newsletter sign-up
This shopping cart script is a data base driven
content management system using PHP and MySQL on a
Unix platform (it may work on a windows but I have
not tested yet). It supports PayPal IPN, LinkPoint,
Worldpay and Authorize.net integration and for
those who have a merchant account at their bank
there is a way to store info encrypted
on the server using mcrypt; it uses a key for
encrypting/decrypting CC numbers to and from the
data base in SSL.
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