You're dreaming of your own online store. Visions of orders streaming in are exciting and seductive. Your customers have been asking for it; your competitors are doing it. You know it's where you want to head, but where do you begin?
Having an online store can be beneficial for many different organizations and applications: retail stores selling material goods online; print magazines taking subscription and advertising payments; charities taking donations; software companies and ebook publishers selling egoods; and many others.
If you wish to accept orders or payments online with an ecommerce website and aren't sure where to start, here are the basics to help explain things.
security
When taking payments online, the single most important thing is that you give your customers a way to pay securely. This isn't optional, it's mandatory. To secure a website, a security (SSL) certificate is implemented to encrypt all data so only you can see your customers' payment information. Encryption makes the data unreadable to anyone except the intended recipient.
It seems that anyone can offer SSL certificates these days, but beware. Not all SSL certificates are trustworthy and safe. We recommend purchasing your secure certificate from a trusted company such as Thawte or Verisign - someone who can stand by their product with research, development, and experience.
You can pay a variety of costs for a secure certificate. Some are hundreds of dollars, some are offered free. When deciding, just remember, you get what you pay for. Anyone can create a certificate for nothing, but it doesn't mean it's done right. Do you want to take the chance that it's not really secure? Choose wisely.
taking orders
The next consideration is implementing a way to take orders online. There are all kinds of software out there which can be installed and customized for your website. These scripts can be very basic or complex, and the prices range depending on your needs. The software takes your customers' information, calculates taxes and shipping, and quite often features many more added functions such as customer management, order history, bestsellers list, special offers and coupons, wholesale and affiliate modules, and so much more.
processing payments
In order to take credit card payments yourself, you will need your own merchant account. We recommend visiting a website such as merchant-accounts.com or merchant-accounts.ca to gain more information about how they work and how to get one.
Once a customer has ordered, the payment must then be processed. There are two ways to go about this. The less costly solution is to process your payments manually. This means that when an order comes in, you'll receive an email asking you to securely log in to your store administration. You take the customers' credit card information from there and process the payment through your merchant account by phone or POS machine.
The more costly but less time-intensive solution is to use a payment gateway, which automatically processes payments in real time at the time of the order without your interaction. All you need to do is fulfill the delivery of your goods or service. Some common gateway services are Moneris eSelect or Global Payments.
If you don't want or can't get your own merchant account, there are websites such as PayPal that will take and process orders for you, however they usually charge higher fees per transaction.
hosted solutions
Implementing all the steps above can get costly and time-consuming to research if you're new to selling online. Fortunately, there are companies who have combined all the steps above into one package so you don't have to concern yourself with all the details. These packages are known as hosted ecommerce solutions.
Our shopping cart ecommerce solution offers basic shopping cart software on our own servers secured by the highly reputable company Thawte. You don't have to download or install anything. Just plug in the code for payment buttons on your website (or have us do it for you!) and in minutes you'll be taking orders.
If you're looking for more robust features like full database-driven customer management, order tracking, product management and more, one of our Storebuilder ecommerce solutions is for you.
There are other hosted storebuilders online like Yahoo Stores and others. However, most of them charge a monthly fee, plus a transaction fee, plus extra fees for higher numbers of products. Not us. With our Storebuilders, you're paying one low price a month with no transaction fees and unlimited products. You'll never encounter hidden costs with our ecommerce solutions. Ever. That makes your budgeting a whole lot easier.
feel like you could use some help?
Does this information sound like mumbo-jumbo to you? If it still isn't clear, a consultation might be the answer. We'd love to devote some time with you on the phone to help you understand and clarify e-commerce, and to help determine what the best options are for your specfic website.
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