posted
My father has decided to put his carpentry skills to more profitable uses. So he is setting up a business to sell stuff at art/craft shows, etc.
I'm going to help him out and setup a website for him. I have no problems with setting up the domain, basic site and all that...the problem comes into the e-commerce side of things.
Does anyone know of any good sites that can host the e-commerce side of a website? I'm looking for something that isn't too expensive, fairly easy to use, etc.
posted
paypal will only help on the payment side. There are a few free/cheap shopping cart type apps out there, and from there it becomes the case of finding a hosting company that will let you run the apps you want.
posted
Not off hand, a Google search ought to bring up some stuff. Or you can go to your favorite mom-n-pop web sites, and look at the bottom for a link to the shopping cart software they are using.
posted
Just code the page as you like (this will look much nicer than most shopping cart setups) and have people email you with orders, and use paypal/kagi for payments. Especially as your father's stuff is likely to involve many permutations and custom work, an out of box shopping cart system is just going to be a constraint.
Actually, I believe paypal even has a plugin for Dreamweaver that allows one to integrate paypal as a shopping cart using only plain html/javascript on the client webpage itself.
In fact, paypal has plugins for Macromedia Contribute (pretty cheap, and good, solution), Dreamweaver, MS FrontPage, MS Visual Studio.NET, NetObjects Fusion, Macromedia Flash MX, and Adobe GoLive. You could also code the code by hand (tutorials are on the paypal site).
posted
Funnily enough, I recently did a lot of research on this very topic.
Depending on how full-on you want the e-commerce implementation to be, there's going to be a fair bit to it, unless you go with Fugu's excellent advice and choose Paypal.
There's quite a few hosted solutions available, where all you do is add your products and payment details and possibly customise the look and feel, although they can be a little expensive. They hook up to the common credit-card gateways though, which is good (and something I'll get to later in the post).
But if you want a REALLY flexible solution that runs on MySQL and PHP on pretty much any decent web host, then www.x-cart.com is for you. It's a bit of a girldog to configure visually, but setting up your store is stupidly easy and VERY flexible.
Now if you want to take more that PayPal, you're going to need to setup a merchant account with a bank and subscribe to a payment gateway, like verisign. Basically an internet merchant account allows for an account where money is held until the end of the trading day from the payment gateway, then forwarded into your account. A payment gateway provides a secure translation for processing online credit-cards into the merchant account. You have to be a little careful, because not all payment gateways support all bank's merchant accounts, and not all e-commerce systems support all payment gateways - you have to get the combo right.
Also, a lot of merchant accounts and payment gateways have transaction fees in addition to monthly fees - so be aware of what their fees are before you choose one.
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