Category: Web Sites 101


Your First Shopping Cart – What You Should Know

Filed Under: General News, Web Sites 101 by suz — Leave a comment
January 10, 2009

So you’re ready to sell online?  Congratulations!  The online marketplace is an exciting world (in a virtual sort of way).  And thanks to new technologies and services, it can be a safe, friendly and profitable place.

I’ll assume you have your product or service worked out, along with prices and delivery methods.  And let’s not forget the marketing plan – you have to know how people will find you.   Got all that in place?

OK.  Now of course you already have a domain name and web site with a good hosting company, right?

What – you don’t have a web site?! Well, that’s OK, you can avoid some mistakes by setting it up AFTER you’ve thought through your shopping cart.   As for the web host, It’s important to make sure your software is compatible with (supported by) your web host. For this reason, your choice of software may effect your choice of web host (or vice versa).  For more information on setting up a web site / host, check my article  Web Site 101 – Costs. My current favorite hosting companies are BlueHost and Lunarpages.  They both offer some easy installation options for  shopping cart software.

OK, NOW you’re ready.  But wait – there are a few things you should consider first – preferably before you set anything up.   These are:

Since these technologies all have to work together, it’s best to make the decisions before you implement anything.  I’ll talk about each one, and how they work together.  I’ll also discuss some possible “shortcuts”.

Shopping Cart Software

What Does It Do? It uses a database to allow you to display, price and sell your products.  It keeps track of customers choices, and sends their order information to the payment gateway.  In most cases, it also helps you keep track of your orders and collect information about your customers.  Other possible features include:  autoresponders (confirmation emails to your customers and you), eNewsletter capabilities (so you can send updates to all your customers), inventory management, shipping and tax calculations, shopper registration / login, product promotion options, and more.

Do I Really Need It? In a word, Yes.

What’s the Best Way? Well, that depends.  Here are some options:

Commercial Software: Best for those setting up a large shopping cart with high volume.  OR if  user friendliness and technical support are high priorities (and you’re willing to pay for them).  Many companies are out there.  Here are just a few:  X-Cart, Cart32, ShopSite, MonsterCommerce

Open Source Software: Open source software is free, publicly shared software.  There are some very good open source shopping carts.  Technical support comes in the form of documents and online forums.  In other words, there’s no 800 number to call – you have to read the directions!  Here are a couple of popular ones:  ZenCart, osCommerce and CubeCart.

Hosted Shopping Carts: You can have someone else host your shopping cart for you.  In other words, you pay for web hosting and shopping cart on one account.  You still have to set up your shopping cart, maintain it, etc.  BUT you don’t have to install it, your technical support will probably be better, and you’ll have help setting up your merchant account and payment gateway, which will then work properly with your shopping cart.  What’s the catch?  Well, you’ll pay monthly fees on the order of $50 (web hosting is included in this fee).  AND you may pay additional transaction fees.  Still, this approach is a viable one for folks who need a web host and a shopping cart, and want to get started without large upfront costs or hassles.  Try Yahoo Small Business or Volusion.

Is There a Shortcut? Well, sort of.  Here it is…..
Buy Now Buttons
If you’re only selling a small number of products on your web site, you can use PayPal or Google Checkout to set up “BUY NOW” buttons.  You create buttons and install them on your own web site, next to your products (assuming you can work with HTML).  When a customer clicks the button, they go to PayPal or Google Checkout to complete the transaction.  In this way, PayPal or Google Checkout acts as your shopping cart, your payment gateway and your merchant account, thus saving you several steps.  Your customer support will not be as good as with a commercial or hosted shopping cart, and you won’t have all of the features.  Still, this approach is a great way to get started, since you could shift to a different system later on.   You pay no upfront or monthly costs, but you do pay transaction fees.   I have set this up for several clients, with good results; My fees are smaller because it takes me less time than setting up a full-on shopping cart.  Right now Google is advertising transaction fees of 2% plus $ .20 per transaction.  PayPal will be about 3% plus $ .30 per transaction.

Payment Gateway

What Does It Do? It accepts you customers’ credit card or eCheck information on a secure server, encrypts it, and communicates that information to your financial institution (merchant account).  There are many services out there.  One reputable one is authorize.net.  You will notice more  – pay attention as you shop online – see who your favorite shopping web sites use.  Your payment gateway may be bundled with a merchant account, or may recommend a compatible merchant account.  See fees below, under Merchant Account.

Do I Really Need It? Yes.  But if you use “the shortcut“  discussed above, PayPal or Google Checkout can act as your payment gateway (and merchant account).

Merchant Account

What Does It Do? It’s a financial institution that’s connected with your own banking account. It receives information from your payment gateway, processes credit cards and eChecks, and allows you to transfer funds between your merchant account and your business / checking account.  Your payment gateway may be bundled with a merchant account, or may recommend a compatible merchant account.

Payment Gateway and Merchant Account Fees
Expect to pay a monthly fee and a transaction fee.
For example, FreeAuthNet and Merchant Account Express are Authorize.net resellers that offer a package deal on a merchant account and Authorize.net gateway. Their rates for merchant and gateway accounts combined are approximately:    $10 – 25 per mo plus 2.15% – 2.33% + $ .25 per transaction

Do I Really Need It? Yes.  But if you use “the shortcut“  discussed above, PayPal or Google Checkout can act as your payment gateway (and merchant account).

SSL Certificate

What Does It Do? Secure Sockets Layer protocol allows private data to be transmitted safely over the internet.  Web sites using SSL start with https: instead of http: an SSL Certificate tells the customer’s browser that the web site is secure.   If you’re selling online, it will be important to your customers that you use this technology.  It’s important to you, too.  You don’t want to be involved in a credit card fraud or stolen identity incident.

Do I Really Need It? In my opinion, yes.  BUT you may be able to share your web host’s SSL for a small fee (or for free).  Also, if you use the shortcut we discussed earlier, you won’t need your own because your secure transaction will take place on a PayPal or Google web site.

Summary

There you have it.  I’d like to say it’s simple, but, well, it’s not.  Hope I’ve shed some light on the process, anyway!  Feel free to contact me if I can help!

Suzi Beaumont
BeauCreations Web Design

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About Naming and Saving Files

Filed Under: General News, Web Sites 101 by suz — Leave a comment
October 14, 2008

Did you ever wonder why computer programmers have such quirky ways of naming files?  Or why they seem neurotic about backups?

Well, different types of programs, for various reasons, restrict what you can do with file names.  If you “break the rules” you can mess up code that would otherwise work, or (more commonly) just bring things to a grinding halt altogether.

And as for backup neorosis?  Well, that’s easy to explain.  In fact, you already know this.  All you have to do is lose several hours of mind-numbing work, and you’re a fan of backups.  OK, some of us may have to repeat this experience a few times, but we do learn eventually….

This is an exceprt from an instructional article I’m writing – it may be helpful to those who are just getting started with HTML, or editing / uploading files to a server via a file manager program.

About file names: In most web applications, file names are case-sensitive, and don’t allow spaces. Since you have to mush words together (no spaces), some people like to use capital letters to make them more readable, like this:

myDocument.html

whatWeDidLastSummer.html

These examples are perfectly legal, though the second one is really too long. Here’s another way to do the same thing without capitalizing.

my_document.html

what_we_did_last_summer.html

This is also perfectly OK. In this case, I used an underscore between words. Hyphens are allowable, but not commonly used. The key is to be consistent, because when the server looks for the file, it has to be entered exactly right, including any caps and underscores.

About saving files: On web sites, when you upload a file to the server, if there’s an old version in place (and there should be), that version is automatically over-written. That means it’s gone forever. For this reason, you have to be sure your changes are correct. Since we all make mistakes, it’s good to have a backup file.

So, let’s say you are editing a file called myDocument.html I recommend first creating a file called myDocumentBak.html as a back up. Then you go back to myDocument.html and make your changes. If something goes horribly wrong (and it will), you’ll just re-name your backup file, put it back where it was, and pretend it all never happened.

Now, here’s another common scenario. You want to create a new document – say, a new article – from an old one. In other words, you’re using one document as a template to create a new one. In this case you just save the old document under a new name immediately upon opening it.

So, I take myDocument.html and save it as myNewDocument.html before I make any changes. The original file remains intact in its old location. The new file has a unique name, so it won’t over-write anything when you put it on the server.

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Websites 101 – Costs

Filed Under: General News, Web Sites 101 by suz — 1 Comment
July 21, 2008

Suzi Beaumont, Web DesignerPost by Suzi Beaumont of BeauCreations Web Design

Recently a prospective client asked “What other costs should I expect” after I’d sent an estimate to design and install her first web site.  So I thought I’d share my answer.  This will be of interest to first time web site would-bes.

Website

First,  let me say that the initial cost of having a custom website professionally designed can vary considerably – that’s why I do detailed estimates with “what’s included” after talking with an interested person.  But since this assessment would be incomplete without the cost of a web site, I’ll go out on a limb here and pick a number.  For my example I’ll use a six page brochure web site, custom designed but with no additional interactive features (no blogs, shopping carts, Flash animation, etc.).  I’ll say this very basic web site would cost $1200 – $1800 for design, construction and installation.

As far as other costs go, I can think of these “ongoing” costs (assuming you already have an Internet Service Provider):

Domain Name

You’ll want to purchase / register this yourself.  It should not cost more than $10 – $15 per year, or even less if you buy five years at once. Plenty of web hosts will include a “free domain for life”, and that’s fine.  But if you decide to change your web host, it can be an additional hassle to separate the domain name.  So I recommend purchasing from someone like GoDaddy, then hosting through a separate company.  Consider setting your account to “auto-renew” right off the bat;  You do NOT want to lose your domain name after your business is established, just because you forgot to renew!

Web Host

Again, you’ll want to purchase this yourself on a separate account.  Some web designers will host the web site for you on their own server computers, so you can get a package deal.  I don’t advocate this because small web designers such as myself, while providing great value in custom designed web sites, cannot compete with the big companies as far as hosting a site is concerned.  You want a web host with 99.9% uptime guaranteed, and lots of customer support staff on duty!  AND you shouldn’t pay more than$7 – $12 per month.My current favorites are BlueHost and Lunarpages.

Incidentally, your web host should include email accounts in your cost. So, for example, if your domain name is www.mywebsite.com, then you can set up an account for me@mywebsite.com.  Then you have an email address that reminds people of your website, and looks more professional.  There should be no additional cost involved.   “But wait” – you say.  “I like to do all my email from my hotmail account -it’s too much work to keep track of all these email accounts!” No problem, just set up an email forward that sends all mail addressed to me@mywebsite.com over to your hotmail or gmail account.  Your web designer may or may not include this type of set-up support in your fee (generally speaking I do this for my clients at no extra cost).  But it’s not rocket surgery – you could figure out how to set this up yourself!

Web Site Maintenance

This is tough to estimate because it depends on your time constraints and ability to learn how to update your own web site.  I have many clients who continue to use my services for all manner of web updates.   Small business clients may spend anywhere from $0 to $300 per month on edits and updates.  My current rate is $50 per hour. This rate varies considerably among web designers.

For budget minded do-it-yourself-ers, there are ways to set up a web site that can be edited.  Edits to the text of existing pages are easy to learn, provided you’re willing to take the time to set up some free ot  inexpensive software on your computer and learn a thing or two about FTP (file transfer protocol – the way your home computer talks to your web host’s server computer when you are updating.)  Or, if you have a shopping cart, there’s no reason you can’t teach yourself to update your products and prices.

But here are some limitations: If you’re adding new pages, moving things around, modifying the design, or adding images that need to be processed for the web (most do), you may need a web designer with the software and expertise to do these things.  Here’s what I told my prospective client, who is doing a shopping cart web site:

“Let’s say we finish the web site, and 3 months later you have six new products to add.  Assuming you know something about image processing, and can take your own digital product shots, I could probably train you to add the new products, prices, etc., in a 3 hour training session.  Or I could do it myself in about 1 hour. So, at $50 / hour,  you’re looking at $50 – $150 for that sort of update”.


“On the other hand, if you decide to do additional pages, re-format the design or layout, switch to a new web host or shopping cart,  add a blog, enhance your search engine optimization, do online marketing, or any other upgrade – well you could spend a couple hundred dollars on each of these. But they are all entirely optional, probably not important for the first year you have a website, and can be done on your time frame as your business grows.”

So you can see there are plenty of considerations, but setting up and maintaining a web site doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.  More importantly, it doesn’t have to take you away from your core business functions – if you don’t have time to think about each micro-decision because you prefer to focus on what you do best, there are services and people out there who can make it easy for you.

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