Ecommerce web hosting

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing sectors of the Internet. People are becoming accustomed to buying things from Internet stores. Every year the volume and value of sales increase substantially. If you want to launch your own ecommerce website you need to know a few basic things to get started.

The first thing you need, of course, is a product or service to sell. If you already own a brick and mortar store you can offer the same items for sale through your website. The number of products that you will sell will determine the type of hosting package you need.

If you have less than 20 items, you could set the whole thing up on a small hosting account. Listing hundreds of products is different - you will need more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features such as databases and a secure connection for accepting payments.

There are two basic options available for accepting payments on the Internet - collecting payment information directly or hiring a third-party service to process credit cards.

SSL (Secure sockets layer)

If you are planning to get or already have a merchant account that you can use to process credit cards you need to have a website with a secure connection. This provides a way to encrypt sensitive data making it impossible to intercept and read it as it travels across the Internet.

If you don't have a secure connection (indicated by https at the start of a web address) you may not be able to collect credit card numbers. Most customers will not post sensitive financial data on an unsecured website.

To get a secure connection you need to apply for an SSL certificate. Companies, such as Verisign and Thawte, require you to supply verifiable information concerning your identity and location and issue these certificates upon proper verification.

Once you have the certificate it must be installed on your website. To install the certificate you need to have a unique IP address.

Hosting companies normally provide a unique IP address at cost and there may be a fee to install the certificate.

Third party gateways

If you need a simpler solution, you can go with a third party service to handle financial transactions for you. To complete a sale, customers are usually redirected to the website of the payment service where they provide their credit card details.

Some of these services have setup fees and charge a commission on each sale, while others (like PayPal) are free to set up and simply take a percentage of each sale.

Shopping carts

Shopping carts are powerful scripts that can be installed in your hosting account to automate the ecommerce experience. By using a shopping cart you can organize your products into categories, create pages to describe categories as well as individual items, keep track of returning clients, recommend other items to customers before they check out, and allow them to rate the products.

Shopping carts can provide a structure for your online business and enrich shopping experience. Many hosting packages provide free shopping cart scripts such as Miva, Agora, osCommerce, and Zen.

When choosing an ecommerce package, ensure it supports your preferred method of payment gateway. If you already have a merchant account with your local bank, choose a shopping cart that supports this particular payment method.

We have an excellent selection of shared hosting and dedicated hosting packages to meet all you ecommerce needs.

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