Web storefront options

[Micah]

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

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

I would not recomend number four. It is doubtful that she would ever come close to recovering the costs (both initial and ongoing) involved.

 

[Micah]

Yeah, the ongoing maintenance of option 4 had me worried as well.

 

[Micah]

bump

 

[Zugzwang152]

Paypal would be the best choice. You can choose to have customers pay through Paypal, or you can just use them as your gateway for credit card transactions with the actual interface being your own.

 

[clamum]

I'm working on a site right now that will use online ordering and we already have an account with Authorize.net. There's several options but I think the one we're going to do involves Authorize.net taking care of the secure payment end of it. We just send the user there to do the transaction and then they get directed back to our site.

 

[SelArom]

Originally posted by: clamum
I'm working on a site right now that will use online ordering and we already have an account with Authorize.net. There's several options but I think the one we're going to do involves Authorize.net taking care of the secure payment end of it. We just send the user there to do the transaction and then they get directed back to our site.

that's definitely the way to go. You can program a simple shopping cart pretty easily, and when you're done just give the customer the total and forward that to the authorization page to collect payment and then pop them back to your site for confirmation. I know paypal for sure has a built-in mechanism for doing this

-SelArom