First of all you should take care about registering the right domain name for your e-commerce website. You can not be serious if you don't have your own www.MyDomain.com.
The next thing to do is to find the right web-hosting company with professional customer support, variety of features, security and up-time guarantee (uninterrupted service). There are too many of them to choose from, but we can recommend our partners at
HOSTING 4LIFE. Web hosting is necessary to host your domain name, files of your website and provide uninterruptible reliable service for back-end transactions between your ecommerce website and real-time payment processors (providers).
To accept credit card payments online you need to establish your own Internet merchant account with a real-time payment processor (provider). Below is a comparison table of companies providing such service.
Sometimes it is much easier and even more profitable to use third party solutions such as PayPal, WorldPay etc. without establishing a merchant account. Below is the comparison table of the third party payment processors (providers).
|
Fees |
PaySystems
Package 1 |
PaySystems
Package 2 |
2Checkout.com |
PayPal CDN |
PayPal USD |
World Pay |
| Discount Rate - Visa, MC,
Discover |
3.95% |
5.50% |
5.50% |
3.40% |
2.90% |
2.95% |
| Discount Rate - American Express |
3.95% |
5.50% |
5.50% |
3.40% |
2.90% |
0.00% |
| Monthly Fee |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$35.00 |
| Per-Authorization Fee |
$1.00 |
$0.55 |
$0.55 |
$0.55 |
$0.35 |
$0.35 |
| Address Verification Fee |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.10 |
| Daily Batch Settlement Fee |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.15 |
| Set-Up Fee |
$49.00 |
$49.00 |
$49.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$299.00 |
| Monthly Fees |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
$39.50 |
In both cases you should do some math and decide which solution is more appropriate for your e-commerce business or even use several solutions together.
The most important part of e-commerce website is a web application that includes: shopping cart, database-driven catalog of your products and Control Panel for managing/updating of products, customers' orders, automatic real-time transactions, security issues, etc. Building such a thing from scratch is a very expensive job. It can cost you thousands of dollars and might take a lot of time to accomplish. There are some companies that offer a build-in ecommerce web service with above mentioned features, for instance Microsoft bCentral or Monster Commerce. But major problems with all of them are:
- It gets really expensive in a long-time perspective (monthly fee, service fees).
- You cannot control your own business if somebody owns the crucial part of it.
- You cannot improve, upgrade, implement new features or move your e-commerce website to other web hosting company.
- You can not go away with your store - you are bound to them forever!
We offer totally reliable, inexpensive and absolutely independent solutions:
E-commerce and E-Store Kits without any kind of monthly fees. Take control of your ecommerce business back in your own hands:
- Choose any payment processor you like.
- Choose any web hosting company you like.
- Choose any web design/layout/skin for your web-store or design your own.
- Maintain and update your web-store without any web programming skills.
- If you need to add some extra or custom features - please do not hesitate to contact us - we are ready to do it for a reasonably small price.
- Enjoy true freedom and flexibility of ecommerce business.
Make your ecommerce website easy to navigate, easy to understand - take care of your customers. Visual design of your website shouldn't distract your visitors from your products. Remember: poor usability and poor web design can kill your e-commerce business.
