i am a small web design and hosting company that currently outsources any e-commerce projects to another company. this outside company has a great product but it can be expensive. many of my clients are on a tight budget and as soon as i tell them the monthly pricing they are turned off.

this product starts at $99/month and goes up from there.

so for me to host their website ($20-30/month) plus the $99/month for the e commerce, a small client will not be able to afford this.

so i am starting to look into offering e-commerce services from my own web server.

my understanding is that i need a few pieces:
1) shopping cart software
2) SSL
3) payment processing/merchant account

is that pretty much it or is there much more to it?

i primarily work with coldfusion and was looking here (http://www.cfwebstore.com/store/index.cfm) for the shopping cart software. from what they say, it can work with many payment processing solutions.

has anyone worked with this?

anybody have any tips in finding and working with a payment processing solution?

and i know that SSL certificates can be obtained pretty cheap now from places like godaddy, but how hard is SSL to setup on my server? any tutorials or info on that?


i know i am asking for a lot of info here but any info or links to tutorials or whatever would be appreciated.

btw - my web server are windows 2003 and i use Helm control panel.

Why don't you write your own? Most of the payment processors have pretty good documentation. And it is just a mater of passing variables to the processor and handling the response when it is returned.

Also if you use your payment processors form you don’t really need ssl. This however can look somewhat unprofessional imho.

I have no experience with helm but most control panels make it very easy to install a certificate. It is just a matter of cut and paste.

yeah i have thought about writign my own, but i figure if i can get a nice robust one for a reasonable price that can be customized, then why reinvent the wheel?

can you reccomment a good payment processing solution? i honest have never worked with anythign but paypal before so i am totally new to this.

The only two I have worked with are http://www.verisign.com/ and http://www.authorizenet.com/. I have never had a major problem with either of them.

Since most of your customers are on a budget athorize is probably a better bet.

There are a few processing solutions still out there besides paypal and stormpay ;)

btw I agree with ecw, verisign is too expensive for what they bring to the table

If your client is processing a lot of transactions, Verisign might be one way to go only because you do get some free transactions with their processing depending on what plan you decide on.

Most processors charge a transaction rate & then the gateway usually charges a minimal transaction rate as well. Authorizenet.com usually is about $.10 with a monthly charge. Verisign can charge up to $60.00 per month, but you get 1,000 free transactions. LinkPoint usually charges about $15-$25 with no other transaction fees.

As far as SSL, it is pretty easy. You need one IP address for each SSL cert though. You can use a shared SSL cert but it is usually not recommended these days because they are so cheap. You should also check out www.ev1servers.net as well for some SSL certs

For a shopping cart, you could use osCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com) which is free and open source... and then customize it for your client's needs. There is a ton of community support available for it to help you.

For a payment gateway, there are a number of options that I'd recommend:
- Authorize.Net
- iTransact
- eProcessingNetwork
- Plug-n-Pay
- CyberSource

Depending on your merchant's needs, one or more of the above gateways might fit very well for their solution. Plus, if you have a shopping cart system that is gateway independent, you could always start with one and then switch gateways later.

For the merchant account portion you may want to consider becoming an agent or reseller for an authorized/registered ISO/MSP who can set you up with the ability to offer these services to your clients in return for upfront & residual income.

Lastly, for the SSL cert - we generally suggest CompleteSSL in that they can setup an SSL cert within minutes and provide great support. (http://www.completessl.com)

OSCommerce is a PHP driven e-commerce solution. Bdee1 said that his/her company primarily deals with ColdFusion. You may want to check out this link... http://hotscripts.com/CFML/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/index.html

They have a good sized list of all the ColdFusion shopping carts that are available and how much you will have to pay for each one of them.

well i ended up purchasing cartweaver and it is pretty cool. its around $200 and is a dreamweaver extension that builds a coldfusion based shopping cart app in minutes. the $200 is a per developer fee so i can use it for as many clients as i wish. it is also completely opensource and very well documented so i can easily make it fit the needs of the client.

i got a shared SSL cert setup which i purchased from godaddy.

so far though i have still only worked with paypal. the next e-commerce client i have, i will hook them up with a "real" gateway.

but that brings up another fuzzy point for me. gateway vs. merchant account. i assume i need both of these to take credit card payments online. i understand that the gateway is the software that does the payment processign but the merchant account - is that the actual bank account that the money goes into?

can someone give me the breakdown on merchant account vs gateway please?

Originally posted by bdee1

but that brings up another fuzzy point for me. gateway vs. merchant account. i assume i need both of these to take credit card payments online. i understand that the gateway is the software that does the payment processign but the merchant account - is that the actual bank account that the money goes into?

can someone give me the breakdown on merchant account vs gateway please?

The Merchant account is a bank account that is specifically setup to allow merchants to process credit cards .. if your client is internet based they'll need a merc acct that is setup that along with the type of product they are selling.
Its totally different than a normal banks business account.

Because of the type of work you do, I think it would be a good idea for you to become a reseller also. That gives you an added recurring income from each referral you are able to get accepted for a merchant account.

Hope that helps :)