E-commerce hosting

[JackL]

ECommerce Hosting

Well actually I am trying to write something out of my scope. Will definitely try to explain in simple terms for a novice.

To be able to understand e-commerce hosting firstly we need to understand what e-commerce is. E-commerce in simple words is electronic commerce, meaning buy/selling products or services online. Examples of such website hostings are ebay.com, amazon.com etc.

Why do we need to start an e-Commerce Website Hosting?

One very important reason you can start e-commerce website hosting is to give your shop a global scope. There is lot of business all over the world and its simply impossible to reach every prospective customer through one shop or having franchisees, this increases a lot of management cost and waste of time to the growing business.

Accept Online Payments

You can accept payments online for your products and services through an good e-commerce website hosting. As you are reaching the global market every customer cannot pay you by cash/cheque for products or services that’s why the most common form of payment online is by credit card. How do you accept credit card payments? You have two choices to accept credit cards. The first one is to sign for a service like PayPal or Authorize.net, which generally accept the credit card payments on your behalf and then send you the money withholding a small percentage for the provided service. Your second option, which is more professional, is to obtain your own merchant account. A merchant account is a bank account used to accept credit card payments. The money is transferred into your standard business account on a regular basis. It’s always better to go with your own merchant account money-wise.
Shopping Cart Software


Shopping cart is software that is running on the server, which purpose is to keep track of the goods and/or services the customer wants to purchase. The shopping cart allows the users to add/remove items from their order list during the shopping process. After the customer has selected all the products and/or services they want to purchase then they navigate to the checkout page. The checkout web page is the page where the customer will see the summary of all products and/or services they have selected. The customer has to enter his personal and payment information on the same checkout page. The shopping cart software usually comes with online administration interface, from where the online store owner can easily edit existing catalog products, add new catalog products, and delete existing catalog products.

SSL certificate

SSL stands for "Secure Socket Layer" and is a web security protocol used to secure the communication between web browser and a web server. You need SSL because it protects the data being exchanged between the customer’s computer and your web server. If you don’t use SSL connection on your payment page, then personal and financial information could be exposed. You can obtain your own SSL certificate from SSL vendors like Thawte.com, GeoTrust.com, and InstantSSL.com.

Conclusion

Creating an Ecommerce online store has never been easier with the advanced Ecommerce shopping solutions available on the market today. You don’t need any web programming or web design knowledge to start your own Ecommerce online store. All you need to do is to find a web hosting company, offering Ecommerce features and buy a hosting plan from it. If you don’t have a web development and programming knowledge, but you still need a customization of the existing Ecommerce solution you are buying, you’ll need to hire a web developer to do it for you.

Regards,
Jack L.
System Administrator.
UK Web Hosting - Cheap Windows Linux cPanel Shared Reseller Web Hosting in UK

[Chris]

I would like to offer a simple e-commerce solution to one of my clients who runs a small business in the UK. He does not have a merchant account to accept credit cards and I understand that this costs thousands of pounds each year to set up.

What do you think is the minimum turnover per year of e-commerce sales that would make a merchant account viable?

Otherwise is the best solution to use the likes of Paypal (or authorize.net ? - I haven't heard of them). ??

Do any forum users have direct experience of starting out in e-commerce???

[ThePants999]

Mmmmm - "It’s always better to go with your own merchant account money-wise" is a bit of a bold assertion, and not one I'm sure I agree with. Even with a merchant account, you still need a credit card processor to deal with the transactions and get the money to your account, and both they and your bank can take transaction fees. The per-transaction fee is typically lower than Paypal and the like, but if your volume is small then the setup costs can remove that benefit.

Chris - I don't really have a general feel for the minimum turnover, but once you have enough info you should be able to calculate it. Ask your client to check with his bank on their merchant account fees, and check up on the fees that would apply via Paypal etc - obviously, it becomes worthwhile to go the merchant account route once the fixed fees for the merchant account are overcome by the difference in transaction costs.

We use www. protx.com as our processor - we're quite low-volume but have a merchant account (take lots of telephone, mail orders etc), and they're only £20/mth with no transaction fees.

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by Chris

I would like to offer a simple e-commerce solution to one of my clients who runs a small business in the UK. He does not have a merchant account to accept credit cards and I understand that this costs thousands of pounds each year to set up.

What do you think is the minimum turnover per year of e-commerce sales that would make a merchant account viable?

Otherwise is the best solution to use the likes of Paypal (or authorize.net ? - I haven't heard of them). ??

Do any forum users have direct experience of starting out in e-commerce???

Your thinking about online payment gateway's is completely wrong. Anyone can open paypal account as thats free and a 2checkout account can be opened for one time fee of $50. You can simply link for payment gateway's to your bank account and whatever funds you receive in your merchant account are deposited in your bank as per the banking wizard setup.

2checkout payment gateway can be used to accept online credit card payments and paypal can be used for paypal - paypal payments as well as credit card payments. 2checkout has got top class fraud prevention system as we are using 2checkout and we have managed to get rid of fraud signups coz of 2checkout. amount of fraund signups that we had with worldpay and authorize.net in past turned up into huge losses for us and we lost good amount of funds in domain registrations and dedicated servers due to fraud signups.

I hope this information would be helpful for you convert few more ecommerce needy customers

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by ThePants999

Ask your client to check with his bank on their merchant account fees.

If you ask your bank to provide a merchant account then you will have to pay minimum £500 to get started and very few people would feel comfortable to pay £500 to get started with online business. If you are starting a new online business and you don't have much to calculate on how much you would manage to sell online then paying such fee's for merchant account is not recommended.

Even if you can afford to do so but how would you get rid of fraud signups or fraud orders ? It becomes very difficult to differentiate even after phone verification as internet scams and credit card frauds are done in a intelligent way this days.

[Chris]

Does anyone on the forum have recent first-time experience of of using paypal or 2checkout for e-commerce. I'd like some local advice as to how much effort and coding is actually required - and if you have found any pitfalls along the way that are worth sharing?

[eUKhost.com]

We are making a new software for which we will need customized payment gateway setup.

Our senior developer has designed customized code to do so and he has been successful with the call back and payment auto update function. I can make some code available for you if you can specify what exactly you are looking to implement.

Paypal and 2checkout are best payment gateways as per my experience. Only reason why authorize.net is preferred on large scale is the auto batch processing service which allows you to charge credit cards in bulk. CC batch function is good to charge existing customers or verified customers but when you need to deal with bulk signups then fraud verification becomes very difficult with authorize.net or worldpay. If you are going to deal with local customers only then choose authorize.net or worldpay only.

[Chris]

Well the application is for a photographer who wants to allow his client to order and pay for photos online - selecting from a gallery of photos and choosing sizes, quantity and other options.

I presume that this could be done using one of the available (free?) shopping carts - and then linking in to PayPal or 2checkout for payment. So I'm not sure any customised software would be absolutely necessary. But that's not to say that it wouldn't improve things. E.g the ability to password protect different photo selections (i.e. specific to individual clients) and auto generate the shopping items would be obvious enhancements.

[eUKhost.com]

Designing some custom software for this requirement would be a tedious job for you. If you are getting paid for it then no harm in doing so

My suggestion would be to choose Zencart or OSCommerce and customize them as per your requirement. Features which you have mentioned can be implemented in oscommerce and I have done similar thing for a customer couple of years ago. I am not sure if I can repeat that.

[Chris]

I note that Zencart is not listed on the Paypal website hosting as being a compatible cart - but osCommerce is in the list.

[eUKhost.com]

It wont take more than 2 mins to install zencart from fantastico. Please configure it and check if paypal is supported in it or not.

If not then say cheers to OSCommerce