A beginner’s guide to website options, features, and services.

9. ONLINE SALES

Overview.

Your website can sell products and services, you can accept donations, and you can allow people to pay for services.

Online transactions are overwhelmingly safe and secure when your web designer creates the mechanisms correctly. These mechanisms include correct programming practices and the use of “secured servers”, which is often a standard hosting feature.

If you want to sell things on your website, what are your options?

Shopping carts.

Shopping allow you to display your items in a catalog format, allow viewers to add or remove items from their "cart", and then allow viewers to "check out". When they check out they enter their billing and shipping information which then either gets emailed to you for manual processing, or automatically processed by the shopping cart software.

Shopping carts come as a standard option with most hosting services, though these carts are often rather basic. If you want more complicated carts that include the ability to have monthly specials, order tracking, statistical analyses and more, your web designer will need to purchase special shopping cart software and adapt it for your needs.

Basic online payment options.

The most basic online payment option is to simply provide your postal address on your website along with some text asking your site’s viewers to please send a check to this address. This may be a good option if you have a low sales volume (less than $200 a month) and a product that isn’t available anywhere else.

Accepting credit cards on your site is critical if you want to maximize your sales. Most online shoppers don’t want to write a check, address and stamp an envelope and wait a week for their check to get to you. What they want is to click a few buttons and buy something NOW.

In traditional brick and mortar stores, processing credit card orders involves having a merchant account with a bank. If you already have one of these accounts you can use it with your website, but you'll have to process each order manually.

This is the preferred method for selling online if you already have a traditional merchant account, and you don't have such a high sales volume that you can't keep up.

Automated online PAYMENT PROCESSING.

If you don’t have a traditional merchant account, or if you want your online sales transactions to be more automated, you’ll need to use an online payment processor.

PayPal is the premier online payment processor. They take a 3% cut of each sale. The downside to using PayPal is that their payment screens generally won’t look like the rest of your site. PayPal is a good choice for sites with less than $1,000 a month in sales.

For sites with large sales volumes, you should get a combination “payment gateway” and internet merchant account. This services costs around $150 to set up plus $30 a month in service charges, and 3% of each sale. This method is used by virtually all high-volume online stores.

<< Previous: Static vs. Dynamic | Top | Next: User Friendliness >>

Request a free estimate today, and work can start within a few days.