Getting started with e-commerce

[hyde]

Will you folks help me put together the big picture about how one ends up with a web site capable of taking orders for things.

I sing with an organization that would like to be able to sell tickets, cds, etc. on-line. I know that the organization has the ability to take credit cards so I think that means we already have a merchant account.

From reading through the forum I know that somewhere in there is setting up a shopping cart application on your web site and getting a certificate to be able to do secure transactions.

Please expound on how all that gets tied together and how many parties have to be involved to make it all work. If one were to pursue it, will the good folks here at Page-Zone hand-hold a novice through it all?

Thanks,
mark

[grobe]

How much volume are you talking about? It is perfectly feasible not to have things like shopping carts and instead have customers either email orders or phone them in. This works fine when you only have a few orders a day. While I expect some people here to respond that this is not secure, many of have heard about numerous "secure" sites being broken into by credit card thieves but very little about
email being intercepted and credit card information being stolen that way.

[kvincent]

Creating a shopping cart is pretty easy. You basically click a few links from the cPanel to install thr CGI, then look around for different options within the admin page. It is a freeware type of shopping cart (Agora). It definitely looks like it will do a job. I never set one up before, and I set some options, created a category and an item within about 10 min. I then 'went shopping', and it works like any other cart (emailed me and the 'shopper'). Pretty cool. It could use some customizing, which I didn't get into yet.

Yes, you need an existing merchant account to process the credit cards. And unless you have a backend processing program, theres a little manual clerking involved. (unless I missed it).

The only thing is, it does not do ssl, at least by default. To do ssl on page-zone, I understand that you just need to get your own certificate, and for a small fee, Page-Zone will set up a static IP to use it. Theres another thread on ssl for the specifics.

This is where I have an extension to this question...how to integrate PayPal, so that shoppers can just jump into the PayPal system for payment, basically like the Page-Zone puchase went. (If you chose paypal). It seems this would be an easy way to initially set up a simple cart, and process orders securely?

[grobe]

Have you read this material on Paypal website payment processing:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr.../index-outside

[kvincent]

Well, isn't that the coolest thing! Thanks!