eCommerce

Where would a website be without eCommerce?

An eCommerce enabled website is 1500% more likely to make the sale.

eCommerce is the ability to collect payment for your products/services directly from your website.

To have an eCommerce enabled website you need to have the ability to collect credit card information onsite.

To do this you will have to either:

1. Have a merchant account with a website collection option.
   
   or
   
2. Use a 3rd party credit card information company.

Getting a merchant account, as in number 1 above, can be expensive.
Banks usually charge in the neighborhood of $500 to $1000 and up.
There are several on line companies offering this service.

Rates vary as do services and transaction percentages but are usually cheaper than the bank charges.

If you are just starting out, or want to use the added features that some of the credit card collection companies offer, then choose the second option.
This option does not require you to have a merchant account, in most cases.

You will pay more per transaction, but will not need to use your capital to start the process.

Having used a number of services, iBill, Verotel, and such, I have moved over to using  2CheckOut as an "Authorized Reseller"
Excellent service, low rates, and the service can be used for:

• Subscription websites.
  If you sell subscriptions to password protected portions of your website then this is for you.
• Downloadable products.
  If you are selling software, graphics, or anything that can be downloaded, then this option will suit.
• "Hard" products.
  these are defined as tangible products that require shipping.

They offer

• State-of-the-art, turnkey point of sale interface
• Sophisticated tools to help you manage customer access, memberships and subscriptions
• Fast, secure transaction processing on their secure Web server
• Advanced fraud control to reduce the risk of chargebacks
• Industry-leading business management and reporting tools
• Turnkey billing solutions including 24/7 live client service
• Multiple payment options that expand your market, including Credit Cards and On-line checks
• Full featured storefront and shopping cart that enables you to sell products or multiple subscriptions and services

For more information on retailer services, CLICK HERE

Another company is Verotel

Verotel offers:

• Verotel sells the tickets for your subscription
• Online credit card and check billing options
• 1-900 telephone billing
• Webmaster Lounge
• Your own Advertising Program
• Verotel is available worldwide!
• Verotel supports recurring billing
• Verotel offers all these services in one simple package.
• There are no setup costs and there are no monthly minimum fees.

For more information on Verotel's services, CLICK HERE

Still another collection company is Click Bank

• ClickBank is the online billing solution used by thousands of web businesses that deliver unique products and services over the Internet itself (via web pages, files, or email).
• Their payment technology lets any web business (a merchant) automatically pay sales commissions to any other web business (an affiliate) that links a paying customer to the merchant. ClickBank bills the customer, pays the merchant, and pays the affiliate.
• ClickBank has a one-time $49.95 activation fee.

For more information about Click Bank CLICK HERE

If you have a lot of products you may want to use a "Shopping Cart" system.

The Dansie cart has everything you need, and a lot that you probably have not thought about.

What can it do for your webstore?

• Increase your web sales!
• If you have a web store, make your customers shopping experience EASY for them.
• A Dansie Shopping Cart will keep track of which items your web store shoppers are interested in, automatically calculate sales tax, shipping/handling and the grand total.
• It has several payment options you can activate including seamless connection with over a dozen popular online real-time credit and debit card processors.
• The cart can email out itemized receipts to you (the merchant) and to your customers.
• Easing the navigation and shopping experience through your web store and reducing confusion will help you increase your web sales!

Some of it's many features:

• Dansie Shopping Cart has been designed to handle almost every electronic commerce need.
• Any expert of HTML and FTP can easily set up a Dansie Shopping Cart on their website without any knowledge of Perl. There are NO variables needed to be set in the shopping cart script in about 95% of all cases. All variables are located in a separate, easy to edit, plain text data file.
• Requires no major changes to your site.
• Unlike some shopping cart software programs, the Dansie Shopping Cart has no limit to the number of items you want to sell with it from your web site.
• It keeps track of the products and prices and automatically calculates shipping, tax and the total for your customer's convenience.
• It allows multiple payment options in order to be flexible for both your customer and you the merchant. You may choose to use any or all of the following payment options:

• Credit Card Transaction Via Telephone
  • The customers order, shipping address and total is emailed to you. The customer calls your telephone number to give you their credit card number.
• Online Check Draft
  • Works with PayByCheck.com (AKA I-Check) is an internet company that will accept your customer's personal check information on their secure server. PayByCheck.com can either print and mail the checks to the address you specify, or can transfer the funds electronically to your checking account within 24 hours. After your customer submits their check information, PayByCheck.com sends them back to the shopping cart to receive their receipt.
  • The Dansie Shopping Cart can also take your customer's bank information and you can print out their check the same day with the use of CheckMan software.
• Check or Money Order
  • The Dansie Shopping Cart can generate a custom order form for your customer to mail to you along with their check or money order.
• COD - Cash On Delivery
  • Your customer enters in their name and shipping address. You ship their products to them COD.
• Auxiliary Payment Options
  • PayPal, CubeCard, and more.

• It allows thumb-nail images of your products in the shopping cart. And your thumbnails can be easily linked to larger images too.
• Can easily be configured to work with your current flat-file database. The use of flat-file databases with the cart is optional.
• Comes with a built-in search engine for your flat-file databases. Allows your customers to find what they want quickly.
• Standard HTML forms can also be used to send product information and prices to the cart. Just by adding some submit buttons to your existing web pages.
• It's capable of making custom calculations at the last second. For example, if a price is determined by the length of a certain item, it can calculate prices according to how many inches your customer chooses.
• It handles Volume Discount Pricing. The prices of your items can get cheaper as your customer orders more quantities.
• Multiple Web store Discounts based upon either the subtotal or the total number of items the customer orders. Put enough demo items into the demo cart to total over $500 and you will see a 10% discount. At $600 you will see 15% and at $1000 you will see a 20% discount.
• Coupon/Gift Certificate Discount feature. Place an item in the demo cart, then enter "abc" as the "coupon or gift certificate number".
• Has an "Add and Redirect" feature that allows your customers to add items to their cart without viewing the contents of their cart every time. Put a Gift Basket in your cart for a demonstration.
• Printable customer receipts and receipts by email too.
• Calculates sales tax for one or more states.
• The cart won't charge sales tax on items that you tag as "nontaxable".
• Customize with your font size, face, color, wallpaper, company logo and much more.
• Choose one of six different methods to calculate shipping charges. And you can have the cart calculate shipping rates to as many countries, locations or speeds of service as you wish.
  • By the weight of the order (you define the weight of each item).
  • By a flat-fee per item (you define the shipping charge of each item).
  • Scaled according to the amount of purchase by flat-fees at various intervals.
  • Scaled according to the amount of purchase by percentages at various intervals.
  • Custom Database Shipping Tables.
  • No shipping charges (you can turn them off and make a "Shipping Included" type of statement).
• The cart is available in any language. All words and phrases in the cart are easily customizable by adjusting your plain text "lang.dat" file.
• The cart will use the currency symbol you define, and the number of decimals in your currency.  Examples:
  • $ 9,999.99
  • £ 9,999.99
  • L 9.000
• The cart uses either IP addresses or cookies to identify your customers. You choose which one. This demo is currently set to use cookies. In some cases the cart can switch to use your customers IP address if they have their cookies disabled.
• Online technical support is available with all shopping cart purchases.
• Dansie Shopping Cart Mall Version will support an unlimited number of merchants using the same cart script.
• Remote shopping cart hosting services are available if your host wont allow you to run CGI Perl scripts on your website.
• Free product upgrades with new customer referrals. Keep up with all the latest features of the Dansie Shopping Cart.
• Never lose a customer again because of a difficult shopping cart. Allow your customers to decide if they want to purchase your product based upon if they want it or not, and not because they can't figure out how to use your shopping cart.
• No special software needed to install. Just a web browser, an FTP program and a plain text editor such as WordPad or NotePad (or SimpleText if you have a Mac).
• Works flawlessly with FrontPage 98 and 2000 for making HTML forms.
• Can work with MySQL/PHP databases.
• Compatible with both Internet Explorer and Netscape. It uses JavaScript 1.2, but is also compatible with JavaScript 1.0 and it is even compatible with a browser that has it's JavaScript turned off because the cart is not JavaScript dependent. As an option, you can tell your cart to use no JavaScript at all.
• Has been successfully installed on Unix, Linux, Windows NT and Windows95/98 systems with Apache, FrontPage, BSDI, NCSA and Netscape-Enterprise server software and many others running Perl 4, Perl 5 and tainted versions of Perl too.
• Works with Blat or Windmail on Windows NT hosts as the CGI sendmail program. If your host is NT, make sure they either already have one of these installed for you to use or that they will let you install one.

• Easily link your thumbnails to your larger images with the "img2" tag. See an example here.
• Pull-down SELECT menus for the state and country so your shoppers can choose from a list instead of typing into TEXT fields while entering their shipping and billing address.
• The cart can generate a random 8 digit alpha-numeric password and email it to your customer after they make a purchase via credit card. It can also append their billing email address and crypted password to an .htpasswd file as their user name and password to allow them immediate access to password protected directories you set up on your website. For details, see "Sell Passwords" in section 14 of the ReadMe.
• And many other features...

For more information and a working demo, CLICK HERE