Hi everybody,

I am first time on your forum, so nice to meet you!

We are establishing a royalty free photographs agency and now we are working on the site where we are planning to sell our royalty-free CDs.

We do not have an experience in e-commerce, so we need your help to choose an e-commerce shared hosting and e-commerce software.

The hosting should be fast (OC-48-192)
Unix
Up to $60/month
Shopping cart written on Perl or PHP
MySQL database for backend
We should be able to change the code of shopping cart software and create our own design of shopping area.
The shopping cart software should be in our directory (on our server).

Looking forward to hearing from you.

I did not get any advice yet. :bawling:

Maybe you, guys, tired to answer the same questions of "all these newbies", looking for a hosting?:unhappy:

OK, then I am answering to my post by myself. ;)

I have got a few offers from some hosting owners in my private box, its OK. But I rather interested to get an opinion of experienced users who are clients of the hostings, but not owners.

Thanks in advance for your help!

tho I will not offer any advice on hosting as that is what I do.

But for the shopping cart I would look at osCommerce open source PHP cart with the MySQL backend, it is a very good cart, but kind of confusing to customize the first time. Or CityShop a perl cgi cart uses either flat file or MySQL backend has a template interface, but again can be tricky to customize.

You will need of course a merchant account, lots of those around, search the web or talk to your own bank first. Of course you will also want SSL I would suggest you get your own cert rather than using a shared one if you are serious about ecommerce. Make sure you get a dedicated IP from whomever you host with so you can get yor own cert. Decide if you are going to process your credit cards manual or use a gateway, to start out I suggest manual until your sales increase enough to cover the gateway cost. A good one is Authorize.net.

That is about it unless there is something else you didn't ask for.

And welcome to the board.

Monte

Monte,

You say "Decide if you are going to process your credit cards manual or use a gateway, to start out I suggest manual until your sales increase enough to cover the gateway cost."

If I choose to process credit card manual, then my buyer will not get authorization online?

And what are gateway costs?

What we are going to create, is something like these:

(There are links to royalty free images stock agencies)

http://www.1stopstock.com/

http://www.ablestock.com/hemera/jsp/frameset.jsp

http://www.comstock.com/web/default.asp?s=26319.5216655731

http://pro.corbis.com/

http://www.istockphoto.com/

http://www.comstock.com/web/default.asp?s=26319.5216655731



So the question is: what hosting do we need to create the site like these (with the same e-commerce options)?

my friend, you won't find the same purchasing system on any host. You can't get the same system as them, it doesn't come on a host.

Its programmed in. You need to get a programmer to make it, there is no host in the world that can give you a complicated system like that.

divinetruth

Our purchasing system will not be so complicated.

We have a set of 10 CDs, on each CD about 100 images.

We are going to start to sell 10 CDs, and further – to sell different images. Afterwards we are going to add second set of 10 CDs, and so on. So in the beginning it will be 10 products (10 CDs), further 1000 products (1000 images), and in the future we will have let's say 20 CDs with 2000 images – its 2000 different products. I think for shopping cart it's not a big problem.

When I gave the sample sites above, I meant that we need a shopping cart that let us change its code and to create a site which will look like these samples (because some shopping carts are coming with ready "shopping area" and you cannot change a lot). Another thing – this cart should operate with MySQL and not with text files.

The best one I know of fro your needs maybe oscommerce it will take a bit to be able to customize it to that extent tho. The other option is to use CityShop and hook it up to MySQL. For that much customization I would suggest you hire Geog Chesher the guy that wrote the code, he is genuis by the way. But either choice is not going to be cheap. If you are willing to settle for a less custom option then oscommerce can be set up for a resonable price to do what you want just not the look and feel of those other sites.

You would only really have to have a gateway if you are going to offer downloaded content if you are shipping then you can verify the card and then ship the product. If you want to use a gateway you are looking at about $25.00 a month gateway fee plus a % of the transaction, figure your merchant account and gateway will run about $50.00 a month depending on the $ amount processed. Setup fees can be from $0 to $350.00 for those.

If you want to PM me and Iwill give you a few links to merchant accounts gateways and shopping carts to look at.

Figure you are looking at expenses of $100.00 a month for hosting carts gateways etc. Setup can run as high as a few grand or as low as a few hundred depending on how much you are going to do yourself and how elaborate you want to get.

Monte

You might want to look over at:

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/

http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/index.html

Go through a selection of them trying their demo versions out. When you find one who's system you like, and feel it'll suit your needs, take that to a hosting company and ask if you can have it installed. Depending on the host they may do it for you for a small fee (as scripting is outside usual hosting support guidelines)

Ideally you'd take it to a webdesigner who could build you a site that would match the quality of your product and have them develop it for you.

PHP Shop isn't too bad, and is fairly simple to modify within limits. OS Commerce from my experience is a bear to change around.

The end result is a shopping cart that suits your needs, on a hosting account that would probably run you a lot less per month than an inclusive e-commerce solution.

Greg Moore

Yes, we are going to ship the product and are not going to sell downloads (especially in the beginning). And for beginning we probably will verify the card manually.

We have a programmer who can customize software written on PHP, Perl or ASP.

The shopping cart we are looking for is not necessary should be free – we are ready to pay for reliable and customizable software (or to take a host, which give us this program free or for some fee), and we want to be able to make our own design of the "shopping area", we don't want to be obliged to use their design and template.

Thank you for your help.

Thank you for the links, we will look it over.

But as I said above, free software is not an end in itself for us. On the other hand, maybe there are free programs, which are better then chargeable ones? :)

Hotscripts is a great resource, with both free and commercial scripts listed. Regarding, you comments, yes, sometimes the free scripts are better than commercial ones though when it comes to shopping carts I tend to think that the free ones do lack something.

On the other side, I remember paying $300 for an auction script for a client's site once. It was a shambles and took me the better part of a week to fix it to a point that it was usable :)

Greg Moore