Hi,
A friend of mine wants to set up a web presence for her home business: making and selling hand-made pottery. It is a very small operation, but she wants to expand to the web and hopefully increase sales a bit.
Anyways, she asked for my wife's help in setting it up, since my wife works on a website ( www.southernspaces.org ). My wife knows the web publishing side, but not the sales side. So, I came here to get advice on how to proceed.
Here's some of what we want (requirements):
1) Accept credit cards (including all the security stuff)
2) Allow users to browse items and add them to a shopping cart
3) Seller gets an e-mail (or some notification) whenever a user makes a purchase.
Here are some of the options that I can see:
1) Set up an e-Bay store.
2) Set up a PayPal merchant account and just include links on the site to PayPal.
3) Become a Yahoo store ( http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/ )
4) Go the do-it-yourself route: purchase some webspace, get some freeware storefront software, set it all up, and run it.
So, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Especially useful would be advice from others in the same situation. What solutions did you choose? What do you like? What do you not like?
Thanks in advance,
Micah
A friend of mine wants to set up a web presence for her home business: making and selling hand-made pottery. It is a very small operation, but she wants to expand to the web and hopefully increase sales a bit.
Anyways, she asked for my wife's help in setting it up, since my wife works on a website ( www.southernspaces.org ). My wife knows the web publishing side, but not the sales side. So, I came here to get advice on how to proceed.
Here's some of what we want (requirements):
1) Accept credit cards (including all the security stuff)
2) Allow users to browse items and add them to a shopping cart
3) Seller gets an e-mail (or some notification) whenever a user makes a purchase.
Here are some of the options that I can see:
1) Set up an e-Bay store.
2) Set up a PayPal merchant account and just include links on the site to PayPal.
3) Become a Yahoo store ( http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/ )
4) Go the do-it-yourself route: purchase some webspace, get some freeware storefront software, set it all up, and run it.
So, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Especially useful would be advice from others in the same situation. What solutions did you choose? What do you like? What do you not like?
Thanks in advance,
Micah