eCommerce Complete

Video Services

Capabilities

TV/In-Studio Production

Computer/Web Services

Purchase a complete eCommerce solution

If you want to set up a complete shopping cart site and own and operate most everything from beginning to end you need to do the following:

1. First you need to establish a commercial bank account at a bank, preferably local to you. All banks can set these up for varying monthly fees (as low as zero depending on the bank). The bank must be on the ACH system (which allows interbank transfers) and we recommend that your bank has some kind of on-line banking feature (this is for your convenience and is not necessary to do web based sales). If you are already in business, you should already have one. If you do not have one, you must first set this up.

2. Next, you need to establish an internet merchant account that will allow you to receive credit card payments via a web site. You must financially qualify with the merchant account vendor and must make an up front purchase of the account and related software to implement the account. On-going costs are related to the transactions that you incur and vary by credit card type. Monies received by the merchant account will be automatically deposited to your commercial account on a regular basis. The one time cost to purchase a merchant account with LinkPoint product of CardService International, a leading vendor in this area, is $500. On-going minimum administrative costs are about $58 per month and are billed at the beginning of each month. Additionally you will incur volume related transaction fees based on your sales volume most of which will be deducted by the credit card vendor at the time of the transaction. There are no additional setup fees for the merchant account.

3. Lastly, you need shopping cart software, that will provide an interface for customers who wish to purchase your products and which will send along the customer's payment to your merchant account. Depending on the nature of your web site, the shopping cart may be able to suffice for your main web site also. There are two approaches to doing this:

a. You can purchase and install any shopping cart you wish. There are a bewildering array of possible choices available in the marketplace and most of them cost a bunch of money and generally require a little technical know how to set up and maintain.

b. Our approach is to provide you with a shopping cart called osCommerce. This is an open source cart that is essentially available for free and has a great many options available for it. We will configure the cart for you and at minimum maintain it's technical features. Making changes to your merchandise and monitoring orders is easy to learn. For an examples of our cart, click here. You would be provided a cart under the talos4.biz domain and we can set up of your initial cart for a one time charge of $75. You would rent the cart and it's associated web space from us for $5 per month.

4. An additional feature of doing business on the internet is that you will need to collect and report sales tax of customers who live in the state in which your business operates. You will have to make arrangements to pay the sales tax you collect to the state in which your business is located.

There are thousands of possible features that can be configured for your cart that are not part of the standard installation. Our consultants can install special features on request for reasonable fees. Most people will find that our standard cart can handle most of the features you will need.

Normally, once your e-commerce site is set up, you are responsible for ongoing maintenance of your site (maintaining inventory, pricing, etc) although you can engage us for this work if you like at the prices for maintenance available on our web hosting page.

Note: unfortunately fraud can be a part of doing business on the Internet. In the event that a customer cancels their payment to you (which they can do for a variety of reasons) you can be find yourself with a "chargeback" in which you have the amount of the charge removed from your account along with a fee from the credit processing company. Our experience is that this has not happened frequently to us or our customers but you need to be aware that it can happen and take it into account when dealing with Internet sales.

Sample of agreement form

To purchase eCommerce services please go to our eCommerce site.

Advantages:

You do not have to share any of the proceeds from your sales in order to afford your eCommerce solution.

Disadvantages:

	Approximately $55 a month in minimum fees. $25 of this is a minimum transaction fee charge; you need to generate about $1,000 per month in order to exceed this minimum.
	You need to establish a local commercial bank account. If you are not incorporated this will usually involve the need to acquire a DBA ("doing business as") or fictitious name certificate from your state government (most banks require this for a commercial account in the name of your business).
	You will need to establish a sales tax account with your state. If you already have one this would not be a problem reporting taxes.