eCommerce Websites for Beginners

eCommerce continues to be a promising alternative, commercially. Regardless of economic conditions, eCommerce continues to expand. It is a profitable enterprise, and it is possible that you can earn a living with it once you become a success at it.

What type of merchandise should you market? Select a type of merchandise that you are very familiar with. For those who are creative, you could consider marketing craft supplies on the web.

Getting things established.

1. You have to have a domain name.

(a) Don’t use hyphenated domain names (people will easily forget the hyphen and end up on the wrong site).

(b) If possible at all, pick a “.com” TLD. If .com is already used, and you pick .net or .biz, people may key in .com out of habit and end up visiting somebody else’s website.

2. You have to have hosting. The server that your website is published to is called a “host” or “Web host”. Don’t be careless about the hosting company you select. There are a lot of discount services available. But as with anything in life, there is no free lunch. Also, if you want people to be able pay on your site, directly, your host must let you have a dedicated IP address and you will need to buy an SSL certificate.

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. You will need a payment “gateway” and merchant account to accept credit cards online. You can’t really expect to succeed unless you allow credit cards. If you acquire your own merchant account, you’ll want to be sure your banking institution will take credit card payments from the web. In most cases they will; however certain ones do not.

Do you want to avoid the hassle of using a merchant account and gateway? There is an answer. Using Paypal really simplifies this process. They provide the payment gateway as well as the merchant account all in one, plus they can even do all the secure transactions on their website so you will not need an SSL certificate. One other gateway that takes care of your order payments on their secure page is 2Checkout. One excellent gateway is authorize.net and, as far as I know, just about every shopping cart has a plug-in to utilize authorize.net. With authorize.net, you will have to have a secure site and your own merchant account. You will be required to pay a percentage of your earnings regardless of whether you choose to create a merchant account and gateway or use Paypal. Usually, the most costly option is Paypal. If your line of business does not allow any more than a very small markup, you will probably need to do the legwork of the gateway and merchant account, yourself.

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.