E-commerce isn't for every business. The cost of setting up an ecommerce site is not limited to the initial site building expense — there are also additional demands upon employee resources for order fulfillment, site maintenance (such as photographing, adding and removing products for sale) and customer service. We understand these issues and are happy to help you determine if e-commerce is right for your business and if so, what solution and implementation plan will work for you.
We can help you implement one of the e-commerce solutions below or can
research other options that may better match your
organization's needs.
| E-commerce option | Description |
FULL FEATURED STORE with shopping cart - (most expensive option) |
We have researched a number of options and hosts for e-commerce
sites. Monstercommerce.com is an even more robust full-featured ASP solution to consider. The main benefit of these stores is that the store and site will
have a custom look throughout and transactions will be processed instantaneously
online. We can implement these or other solutions that may work better
for your organization. |
OFFLINE TRANSACTION PROCESSING (a less expensive option -- a good first step toward e-commerce) |
This is the most basic option and may be a good solution if you have 5 or less items to sell (or courses to register for) on your site. With this option, we simply would set up a form where people could order your product or register for a class. Their data would be stored in a secure folder on your web site that would require a password to access (making it safe for storing credit card information). Credit cards would be processed manually by you through your offline merchant account. Although you will still need a merchant account to process credit cards, you will not need a payment gateway as with the options above as you will not be processing card transactions on your site. |
YAHOO STORES (mid-range option) |
A Yahoo Store is a less expensive ASP option for obtaining ecommerce functionality. The primary advantage is that sites built this way can get business from shoppers visiting Yahoo's online shopping area. It requires little if any HTML knowledge to set up and maintain, but similar to the above option, you may desire Stellar Communications' help with customizing the available site templates, scanning images, developing buttons, store organization advice, setup or preparing images for the web. |
PAYPAL (the least expensive option, an easy first step) |
PayPal is the least expensive option if you want to have payments processed online and do not want to have to set up a merchant account. Your customers do not have to be PayPal registered users to buy from you (this used to be the case in the past). To use PayPal, you first have to register as a merchant with them and enter your bank account info (where they will transfer money), and then you would simply add “purchase,” “register” and/or “add to cart” buttons to your items for sale on your site. Minor HTML knowledge is needed to set up these buttons, making this the least expensive ecommerce option. The downside of PayPal is that customers complete their transactions on PayPal’s site, not yours, so the look and feel is not integrated with your site (although you can add your logo to shopping cart pages). |