Over the last month I’ve been building up an online store. I’ve been providing web hosting for clients and friends for about 4 years, but decided it was time I start filling up our very under utilised web servers. Plus a few of my clients also have products they might like to sell, so I went down the path of learning how to do e-commerce.
Really it boiled down to a few points:
– getting merchant facilities
– setting up a secure server
– setting up a shopping cart
Getting the merchant facilities was the most complicated part. As useful as services like Pay Pal and Paymate are, they didn’t really offer me the flexibility that I required. I tried a paypal donation form on one of my sites for a while and the whole pay in US dollars stuff (we’re in Australia) just scared people.
Anyway after tentative approaches to a number of third parties merchants and some very unhelpful discussions with the major banks, I stumbled across a gateway provider called
eway who in turn pointed me to St. George Bank. Dealing with St.George was a dream and after the requisite business plan and a few emails we were approved.
Eway provided us with code to access their gateway and after a couple of hours our php monkey had a working payments page. In the meantime I evaluated a number of shopping carts and finally settled on oscommerce. Why oscommerce? It’s open source, its written in php and it is very flexable. What more can I say? Oh yeah, it has an eway payment module..!
I operate several web servers so setting up a secure site wasn’t really a problem, however I was shocked at the price of ssl certificates. Luckly I remembered that Rackshack had a special on Geotrust certificates. That did the trick nicely.
All up it set us back about $400 Australian, plus time and labour of course. So now we’re working out what else we can sell. But that is another story.