So you want to build an eCommerce Website? eCommerce websites enable visitors to make purchases of products or servies online. There are many eCommerce solutions out there ranging from simple to complex. But here we are going to talk about two very different solutions for getting an eCommerce site: 1) Hosted Solution, 2) Build Your Own.
The first solution is to go with a hosted eCommerce solution. Yahoo Stores as an classic example. You basically pay Yahoo a monthly fee and they will host your eCommerce store on their eCommerce platform and take care of payment processing. The advantage of this solution is that it is easy to get started because the eCommerce host (such as Yahoo) already have the eCommerce infrastructure in play. Often you just need to setup a few configuration as to the style and title of your store and upload products.
Example of hosted eCommerce Solutions are ...
The second way of getting an eCommerce site is to build an eCommerce site by integrating various shopping cart application and payment processors out there. One example of this is to purchase shared webhosting (with say Hostmonster) and then integrate a third-party shopping cart application (say ZenCart) with a payment processor (such as PayPal). The advantage of this solution is that for small volume sites this is generally lower in cost. The disadvantage is that is will require a lot of development effort to implement and generally you will need a web developer to do it for you unless you are technically inclined.
When building your own eCommerce site, you generally will want to integrate a shopping cart application on your webhost. This is functionality that lets your site sign up new customers, assign them logins and password, and track their purchases. It is needed to collect your customers shipping and billing address and payment methods.
When selecting a shopping cart, you have to see if it runs on your webhost platform. For example, many of the shopping cart application requires PHP and MySQL database in order to run. So then you will need to have a webhost that supports PHP and MySQL.
Some example for shopping carts are ..
Some people might want an content management system with eCommerce functionality. Some possible combination are ...
In addition to having a shopping cart, you need a payment processor that processes payments and connects to banks to validate credit cards. Typically, shopping carts will pass information to the payment processor to process. You have to check to see which payment processor your shopping cart can integrate with. PayPal appears to an easy payment processor to get started with. Below are some additional payment processors.
In the eCommerce industry you will hear about terms like "Merchant Accounts" and "Gateways". You can learn more about merchant accounts and gateways on Wikipedia. And if you are integrating merchant accounts with ZenCart, here is another good overview.
Sitepoint: How to pick a shopping cart
