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 bureaucratic 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 thing you will need is an SSL certificate. Our server comes with a free built in capacity to install an SSL certificate for free (Let's Encrypt) saving you what used to be a cost to do so.
We can guide you through the maze that ecommerce and often be. Talk to us now.