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In my last article I wrote about points to consider when choosing a web host (someone to host your web site and provide you with the hardware, service, and data access to the world). In this article we’ll focus more on e-commerce questions and concerns regarding your web site.
For the purposes of this article we’ll over-simplify the types of web sites in the world to two: those that provide information only (like this site) and those that sell products and/or services. This article caters to the latter.
When you sell something online you are basically exchanging goods/services for payment (aka “money”). To do this you typically want an e-commerce web site (an “online store”) that you can add products to, help users shop, then facility shipping the products to them in exchange for payment. It’s the payment portion that usually trips up most developers.
Back in the day Verisign was end-all/say-all in payment processing and had a very nice service called “PayFlowPro.” Now the payment side of Verisign has been acquired by PayPal (who is owned by eBay). Google has also thrown their hat into the ring with their Google Checkout offering.
But, where to begin? If you’re using an off the shelf e-commerce solution, your options may already be limited to what’s been packaged in with your web application. If you’re going to “manually” process (or reconcile) your payments (say a the end of each day), you could go with any number of solutions. And lastly, if you’re building your own solution (or having one built for you), again, you could go with any number of solutions.
Card service sales is a merchant account company that offers this type of merchant accounts to web sites and online stores. They have free software, reprogramming, and other free services available. Give them a look! (http://www.cardservicesales.com)
