eCommerce Websites for Beginners

A good business choice is eCommerce. eCommerce continues to grow, regardless of the state of the economy. It’s an excellent way to make extra cash, and possibly support yourself if you’re good at it.

What are good products to sell? When it comes to picking a product, go with what you know. If you happen to be a crafty person, you might decide to market supplies for hobbyist.

Making arrangements:

1. A good domain name is essential.

(a) Stay away from hyphenated domain names (it’s too easy for people to forget the hyphen and end up on another site).

(b) Select a .com “TLD” if you can. If the .com version is not available, and you select .net or .biz instead, visitors are quite likely to type in .com out of habit, and not go to your site.

2. Hosting will be required. The server you put your website on is called a “host”. Be selective. There are a lot of bargain hosts available. However, it’s true that it’s sometimes worth it to pay a little more. You have to have a dedicated IP address as well as a SSL certificate if you want to have individuals pay directly on your website (See item 4, below to discuss payment options.)

3. You have to have eCommerce software (shopping cart software). An excellent brand is OSCommerce. It is relatively simple to learn and it’s free. OSCommerce has themes available (also known as skins or templates). There is also no charge for ZenCart and it is reasonably simple to learn. It also has themes that you can use to change the look. A PHP programmer will be needed to make any major changes the appearance of either of these packages. Several eCommerce packages are available that need a programmer to load and set up. This will generally require a lot of money, and nearly all of the large eCommerce packages won’t operate with a shared hosting plan because it needs extensive server resources. So figure on paying more for hosting for a deluxe software package.

4. A merchant account and a payment gateway will be needed. It’s very difficult to run an eCommerce site unless you can accept credit cards. If you set up a merchant account for yourself, you must be certain that you can use credit cards on the Internet at your bank. The majority will, but there are some that will not allow web payments.

Would you like to avoid the hassle of a merchant account and payment gateway? It is possible to solve all these issues. Paypal really simplifies this. They furnish the payment gateway and merchant account all in one, take care of all the security. 2Checkout is a combined gateway that takes care of transactions at their own secure website. Regardless of the option you select — DIY with merchant account and gateway, or the Paypal route — it will be necessary to pay out a fraction of your sales price. Generally speaking, PayPal costs a bit more. In case your market can’t permit anything over a minimal markup, then it will be up to you to take care of the legwork. Authorize.net makes a fine gateway, with every shopping cart I’ve come across, including plug-ins for this site – but he checkout is performed directly on your site, so SSL will be required.

Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. If you are looking for a Houston web site designer, look no further. If you need a few changes to your current site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance whether we host your site or not.