How can I have a website design coded for ecommerce?
I have Photoshop design of a website I would like coded so that it becomes an ecommerce website where customers can purchase my products online, log into a ‘wholesale’ area and manage their purchasing. What is the best way to do this? What software/programs/services? Thank you!
Tagged with: ecommerce website • software programs • wholesale • wholesale area
Filed under: Website Design
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Coding a site for e-commerce can be done in many different ways. One of the biggest factors is how payment processing will be handled. For example, if you choose to use PayPal – as many do that are starting out – your costs will be lower for your hosting. (Can usually avoid purchasing a security certificate.) This is because all the actual transaction data is handled on PayPal’s secure servers.
https://www.paypal.com/
Even better, assuming you know how to write your own HTML code, etc., PayPal offers a lot of help in their documentation and tools in getting you started.
Google Checkout is another payment processing company that works similar to PayPal:
http://checkout.google.com/
Google has more restrictions over the kinds of products you can sell, so read through those sections carefully.
This is assuming you want to code your HTML and so forth yourself. I’ll get into software that provides support for such things in a bit…
In order to take advantage of EITHER company’s fraud protection services, you will need to provide various terms and conditions statements – such as your returns policy – on your site. Again, read over the requirements and advice. (Good stuff, even if you never use their services!)
The next level of an e-commerce site, where the transaction process would occur on your site, involves a lot more stuff and cost. You’d need a security certificate for the site, and arrange payment processing through a combination of services including a merchant account setup through a local bank. Costs for doing such a setup is significantly higher, which is why I suggest waiting until you know your sales will produce a steady profit of at least $1,000 per month. Then again, such services will automate many of the details you will be handling yourself going the other route. (Thus saving you time and effort.)
As to what kind of software you might want to run on such a site… Again, there are a lot of choices out there. Rather hard to make a recommendation unless I knew more about what you were selling, how you planned to handle the transactions, your level of expertise in so far as handling coding, databases, etc.
Another issue in choosing the software is if you are looking for a commercial solution or open source (License free). Let me warn you, there are a LOT of opinions on which direction someone should go. Developers, such as myself, will always tend to go in one direction in this area over another. I’m not going to get into explaining the pros/cons of either methodology here, as I’m spending a lot of time on this answer as it is. Suffice to say, that’s a good question to ask on its own!
Good news for you is that software designed for ecommerce use may have plug-ins, or add-ons available to integrate with PayPal, Google’s Checkout, etc. (If going open source, avoiding the cost of licensing too.) But, this again is very dependent on the exact software in use.
Finally, assuming the design you have isn’t too complicated, a good developer should have little trouble converting that for use as a theme, skin, or template set for use with the software you plan to use. I would certainly ask the developer to give you links for similar setups that they have done somewhere before hiring them! (So you can check them out to see if they look nice and actually work.)
Good luck with your project!
You can learn the code (HTML) which is not all that hard and a lot of fun or you could get a web design program my 2 favorite are:
Microsoft Expression Web
Adobe Dreamweave
Would love to assist with your site! I am an e-commerce consultant who works at a software development company. Can you provide a more detailed description of how you want the site to function, how users will interact with it, etc? Please feel free to contact me directly too.
Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business is right up your alley. It is template based but you can also tweak the HTML if you want to customize it further.
Cheers,
Jeff
MSFT Office Live Outreach
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/
Hi,
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