To sell products or services on the Internet you need four things:
1. Shopping cart software that handles the transaction of creating an order and transmitting the charge to a merchant account (the place that processes a credit card transaction). There are literally hundreds of such carts and what you select is a combination of your needs and the cost to implement one. You can use a cart which is available for free or purchase one from a commercial vendor. Free carts available on our server include Magento, osCommerce, OpenCart, , SugarCRM and ZenCart but there are no limits to what you can install on our server. We have also used a third party applications called Ecwid that integrates well into most web sites include Joomla based sites. We have used Magento and Ecwid extensively. Due to its complexity it is probably not for small limited installations however.
2. The second piece of the eCommerce puzzel you will need is a merchant account. As explained above, it is the mechanism through which your customer's credit card order is transmitted ultimately to your checking account. Numerous commercial merchant accounts are available but there is usually some minimum monthly cost. PayPal is an option for many and while we are not a great fan of them due to their excessive bureaucracy policies that sometimes border on extortion, they can be an acceptable solution for a small company situation. There are a plethoral of merchant account vendors, most of which charge monthly fees. This may be cost effective in large volume situations but is not a cost effective solution for small businesses. Our recommendation for most customers is Stripe. The transaction fees are comparable to PayPal and they don't impose the bureacracy that PayPal does. In any event we can assist you with your choices in this area.
3 The last two things you will need are a fixed IP address and an SSL certificate. In order to do business on the Internet and process financial transactions securely you must puchase an SSL certificate from a certified vendor. All browsers are setup to recognize certified SSL certificates and seemlessly allow a secure transaction to be processed. For the SSL certificate to work, it must be located at a unique address which is where a fixed IP address is required. This IP address will be associated with your domain. The SSL cert is normally an annual cost ranging from $65 a year to purchase on up. With us however we provide encrypted certificates at no cost to you using a service called Let's Encrypt. A fixed IP address will cost you $5 a month and would be rolled into your web hosting fees.
We can guide you through the maze that ecommerce and often be. Talk to us now.