E-Commerce Hosting Guide:

So, you are planning on setting up shop on the web, where do you start?

One of the first things you will need, of course, is an ecommerce host. E-commerce hosts provide businesses with the resources which enable them to sell their products or services on the web: a web server and the facilities required to manage online transactions, templates for building store fronts and online catalogs, support for secure credit card purchasing, and tools for tracking inventory.

Before choosing your ecommerce host, you will need to know exactly what your require from a web-store, both now and in the future; you will need to know which web-store applications on the market best fit these needs, so you can choose an ecommerce host who supports these applications; and you will need to estimate how much it will cost you to run your store on an ongoing basis.

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Great article.

I'd also add:

- You need to decide about the business practices and then find the service and software that will let you do what your business wants to do. For example, do you need a system that will interface directly to say UPS to compute shipping costs in real-time? Do you want customers to be able to track the status of thier orders online? Can you ship products right away or do order have to wait a few days to get everything together?

- On the technical end, you need to decide who is going to do the development and support of the site. If you go with a designer he/she probably is affiliated with a host so they are familiar with the capabilities of the service and software. If you do it yourself, expect to spend some time learning how to set things up, especially the shopping cart mechanism. You can't just "toss" all your products onto a web page and expect the cart to somehow magically pick it all up, format it as you want, features, specials etc etc. Most carts aren't hard to use but you have to committ some time to learning it.

I would recomend you use a software package like Actinic and then choose a hosting company. Have a look at www.actinic.co.uk for the software. Its quite easy to use and configure and you should be able to put something together in hours. They also offer a free 30 day trial to play around with the software so its may be worth your while trying that. We ourselves use Actinic and we are happy with it. We have a demo site on our site (under ecommerce accounts) and our own website also uses Actinic. Also bear in mind if you will proberly need a merchant account. (Worldpay, Net Banx, Sec Pay....)

Modertator's Comments: Sorry Curtis, no self referals!