Online Storefront

If you have a small business, you may want to consider a storefront or an online mall. For a fee, these services help you build and will host a small Web site through which to sell your products or services. These "site in a box" Web site services generally have options that include everything you need to sell online.

Features and support vary by program and can include options such as search engine placement, credit card processing, and advertising. They tend to be template services, however, with less flexibility than a custom site. Familiarize yourself with current offerings in this area before making a final decision.

Custom Sites

If you have a business that is too large for or has outgrown smaller storefront services, you may want to consider more flexible custom site. For added cost you can have a unique site, receive greater support, and handle more traffic. You have options of hiring same company to design and host your site or using separate design and hosting services.

Hiring same company to design and host your site.

This option involves fewest logistics, but may come with trade-offs in design quality or host reliability. Be aware that designing and hosting require different sets of skills and expertise. When choosing a service, evaluate their experience and ask for references in both areas. Go to sites company has designed and navigate them. Note how sites look, how easy they are to understand, and how quickly they load into your browser.

To evaluate company’s ecommerce hosting capabilities, contact current customers and ask how pleased they are with service. Find out how often server is down and ask about help desk responsiveness. Find out what order related issues - if any - they have experienced. Also, consider how your site will be updated. Can you upload changes directly or do you have to wait for someone at hosting company to get to it? If it is latter, ask current customers about their experience with this process.

You can accept online payments from an ECommerce Web site in two general ways:

1)Through your own online merchant account and/or 2)Through a third party online payment processor.

Accepting Payments Online through your own Internet Merchant Account

Accepting payments online via a merchant account puts you in control and limits your reliability on outside payment acceptance services. This approach can also seem like a jigsaw puzzle. Besides an Internet merchant account, you will need shopping cart software, a store or site host, a processor, and a secure payment gateway.

You may fit these pieces together in several different ways. On one end of spectrum, you can choose provider for each piece individually. On other end, you may choose a turnkey solution, where a single provider has completed puzzle for you.

There is no single best solution. Your choice will depend on your particular needs and experience. Among other considerations, you should factor in your own comfort with technologies, customer convenience, providers' service levels, available technical support, reliability, costs, and time commitment involved.

Fees

There are a myriad of potential costs and fees involved in accepting payments online, making it difficult to compare different options.

Potentially, you could be charged fees by each provider involved in helping you accept payments online - application fees, set-up fees, yearly memberships, monthly statement charges, monthly minimums, gateway access fees, statement fees, fixed transaction fees, variable transaction discount rates (processing fee for each transaction), and cancellation penalties are all common.