Start your ecommerce website with shopping cart

[charlesgan]

Start your ecommerce website with shopping cart

Through my career as webmaster, ten of people been asking me help to setup their ecommerce online store. For a technical people like me, and many others webmaster, setup ecommerce store is not hard, and probably took 1 or two hours to complete.

If you are a beginner, then this will be a good guide:

1. find hosting plan that have ecommerce shopping cart, eg. Oscommerce, zen cart. These shopping cart are come with fantastico. Hosting that offering this are: hostgator for example. I suggest hostgator, because I setup ecommerce at the hosting plan before.

2. login to cpanel control panel. Under ecommerce section, you will see few shopping cart available. Select oscommerce. Installer will start. Follow installation tutorial from:
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/...stallation.htm

3. Basically you need to setup: oscommerce, access right, mysql database, and upload products to complete your online store.

Good luck and happy learning!

[CFPS]

I've setup shopping carts for customers but what I'd like to know is what is the best place to get a Merchant account for accepting major credit cards. Accepting PayPal is very easy to setup and costs nothing, but there are still folks that prefer to use credit cards and don't even have a PayPal account. In fact, one of my clients that wanted to setup an online store didn't even have one.

I use VirtueMart with Joomla and it's easy with tons of payment and product customization options.

Any recommendations for credit card merchant accounts? Someplace that is reliable, affordable, and has good customer service.

Thanks