Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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| Starting an Online Retail Store |
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Some things to consider. (I intend on fleshing this out later.)
You've probably already taken care of the basics like registering your company name in your state (or otherwise depending upon your location), obtaining a Tax Id to allow you to collect sales tax for in-state orders, and securing a source (wholesale supplier or otherwise) for your inventory, but what about getting your website going for online sales?
Here are a few points to think about...
- An early consideration will be to obtain a domain name for your website. See GoDaddy.com or other registrar to obtain your domain name if you haven't gotten one already.
- You need to decide how your store will deal with orders. Will you simply provide a telephone number, email address or mail form for customers to contact you for offline order processing? Maybe a simple PayPal shopping cart will work, or maybe you intend on providing full support for credit cards.
Credit card processing requires a merchant account. Check out Charge.com for one place where you can get started. You will also want a shopping cart system that can handle the details of CC processing for you. You will need to obtain a SSL certificate so that credit card information can be processed with 128-bit encryption for secure ordering. Check out GeoTrust.com, a possible source for your certificate.
Shopping cart systems usually utilize a database to store your inventory and orders. You'll need a website that supports MySQL or whatever DB your desired shopping cart system uses. Some carts might be *nix-based (Unix/Linux/etc) others Windows-based, so make sure that your hosting account's OS matches your desired cart. There are hundreds of different shopping cart programs, if you'd like an example check out X-Cart.com.
- You need to get a hosting account. Select based on the features and OS that you need at a reasonable price. Big hosting companies can be expensive, small hosting companies can be less reliable, so do your research. Disk space and bandwidth limits are important considerations. Be sure that your host supports SSL certs if you want to provide credit card support. Your shopping cart may be written in PHP, Perl or other language. Ensure that your host supports the language of the cart or other software that you want to run.
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Wed Oct 06, 2004 6:33 pm
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UnXpected
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
Posts: 58
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I think the most impt is What shopping cart you use 
I would recommend OS commerce bcos i am using it 
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Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:38 am
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Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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UnXpected is right. The user interface is extremely important. Open Source technology is best because, if you are any good at technology, you are never stranded without options.
Fishcart rocks. It runs on PHP4, MySQL (or Postgresql), Apache. It'll run on Unix or Windows (why you would serve anything on an overpriced consumer desktop OS is beyond me).
Also, Wells Fargo's Secure Source Suite is a great value for the money. With Wells Fargo, you deal with _people_ instead of autoresponders. That makes all the difference if you are serious about a sustainable business over the web.
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Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:12 pm
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Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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| Certs |
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Certs are totally optional. Certs are a racket. People are frightened into buying them. It's a simple matter to generate your own cert. Of course, if you make your own cert, people get that extra popup asking them to install your cert. They click yes and that's that.
If you have a product people want and you're selling it at a price in line with what the market will bear, nobody will stop the deal over a cert popup.
Cert popups are a natural function of the protocol. They actually inspire faith in the security of the system. Yes, it's nice without them. If your business grows to a certain size, you will want to eventually pay off the cert people.
But an external cert authority is absolutely not a requirement. The encryption works just the same. Keep your cert secure and it will prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, just the same. Genning your own cert is every bit as secure as paying the highest CA fee.
Those are the facts about certs.
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Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:13 pm
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