Best system for online business shopping cart?

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In your opinion, what's the best system for online business with shopping cart and checkout capabilities?

I'm looking to expand my business this year, and need to build a nice website with shopping cart and checkout. I also want it to be basically self-serve. That is, I want people to be able to input their credit card number (securely) have the computer verify and charge the funds, then email me the order so I can pick, pack and ship it.

I don't know really where to start. Can you help?

Thanks,

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You will need:

1) Shopping cart software. This is hosted on your site and is not all that you think it is. See below.

2) Proccessing service. Your shopping cart is not going to access credit card networks itself, so it will need to communicate with a processing company.

3) Communication between the processing company and your software.

Merchant accounts, processing companies etc take a cut, and cost money. So you need to start this research there, not with cart software as this has a direct effect on your business bottom line.

You will need to look at their rates and how well they integrate into different applications.

Authorize.net, WorldPay, and Moneris are some examples off the top of my head but this is the important part so research it well.

After that, you find some software that is easy to integrate with this.

Alternately, if you want less of a hassle use a service like yahoo stores. What you are asking about requires some technical expertise, so unless you know how to do it or hire someone who does you might want to try a service.

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Thanks, Craven. You are a wealth of information!

Just for my own clarification, please tell me if the following are correct assumptions on my part:

1. "Merchant Account" is defined the same as for a bricks and mortar business--that is, a Merchant Account is simply a business's ability to accept and process credit cards.

2. "Yahoo! Stores" is on the same plane as Miva. That is, both are services which help someone set up an online store.

3. the "Services" you speak of are more-or-less "kits" to set up and run an online store, and are generally inclusive of the software needed to build the structure of an online catalog, shopping cart, and online credit card acceptance.

Am I on the right track here?

Thanks again,

General Tsao

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GeneralTsao wrote:

1. "Merchant Account" is defined the same as for a bricks and mortar business--that is, a Merchant Account is simply a business's ability to accept and process credit cards.

Not really, a merchant account is just an account. The ability to process the payments requires technology.

Online you need to be able to process payments and you can do this with or without a merchant account and the main thing you need is the processing service itself.

Quote:

2. "Yahoo! Stores" is on the same plane as Miva. That is, both are services which help someone set up an online store.

Miva offers subsets of the total package as well. But as far as I know, yes, both offer total packages with hosting included.

Quote:

3. the "Services" you speak of are more-or-less "kits" to set up and run an online store, and are generally inclusive of the software needed to build the structure of an online catalog, shopping cart, and online credit card acceptance.

Think of them as remotely hosted solutions.

If you do it yourself you need to be able to put together and keep together the applications, if you go with a remotely hosted application it's streamlined but you may pay more in the long run and you have less autonomy.