Music E-Commerce - Doing Large Quantities At Once

Hi Folks,
I appreciate your time and expertise, so I'll try to be succinct:
1) I'm setting-up a site to sell orig. music - CD's, downloads
and sheet music. Number of products - probably no more
than 50.
2) Given the nature of the music (contemporary inspirational)
and empathetic backstory, looks like we'll be getting
some national t.v. exposure
3) At the risk of sounding naiive, I hear that one of the
major reasons for online commerce failure is being
ill-prepared for potential success. Therefore:
I want to find a robust host, shopping cart and third
party solution which could handle occasional huge bursts
of traffic (think of the response some infomercials may
have - literally thousands and thousands of people
simultaneously) without worry of crashing.
I'd rather pay for reliability than get something for free
and have no accountability. I don't have huge budget, but
I'm not looking to cut corners.
4) I want to be able to take all four major credit cards
and PayPal - as I will be dealing primarily with 40+ age
group. I also want the site to appear extremely safe -
SSL, Better Business Bureau, etc., and be extremely easy
to use.
5) I know your time to respond is limited, so can you direct
me to someone/someplace where I could get detailed,
expert answers to these questions?
I live in the San Fernando Valley - a suburb of Los
Angeles. Would love to find a local reasonable one-stop
person with serious expertise who could set this whole
thing up.
6) One more thing: if anyone knows about the best process of
selling digital music downloads on one's own site, I'd
love to get directed to detailed info as well.
Thank you so much for replying.
Jack

If you want to start off on the right foot you shoud be considering a clustered load balanced solution for redundancy , you might also consider geographic redundancy.





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Forgive me, but I don't understand what that means. Can you tell me where I can go to learn?

You can find some companies that will offer you a one stop shop, but chances are they will be outsourcing something, either the hosting, the merchant account, the electronic payment gateway, domain registration etc.
For example, Yahoo has one solution, using their gateway and hosting, but the merchant account would be through First Data. And their gateway also has a charge associated with it. Yahoo also supports Paypal now as well so it does offer a specific solution.
You might take a look at Payloadz - they will support Paypal and then with Paypal, you will probably be able to accept credit cards without having the user need a Paypal account since you are in the United States.
One thing to consider is how much you are going to be charging. If it is a small transaction, Paypal has a feature for micropayments. This might help you because usually the transaction rate for an Internet transaction can range from $.15 to $.50+. For a lower transaction fee, you can always contact the merchant account provider, explain to them that you will (hopefully) have a lot of transactions under $1.00. They might be able to get you a lower transaction rate (some might request the discount rate be raised some). The discount rate is a percentage, so that would not hurt your return as much as the flat rate. Of course, this is assuming you are going to have transactions under a couple of dollars.
For your question regarding redundancy, you might search through the forums some or post specific questions in the proper zone. I know that you are wanting to learn, but it might help to read through some of the message posts and determine if you want to adding hosting to your business plan.
In downtown Los Angeles there are a couple of datacenters that you can lease server(s) from. If you think you would need load balancing, F5 has a pretty good product to check out.





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Hi Felixx,
If you are still looking for this solution, there is a easy way to set up what your looking for. Please google "Retail Zip".
Regards,
-Will