Types of Website
One of the ways of making money on the web is to sell products and services online. You can reach a wider audience, with lower overheads and reduced cost of sale.
Review of E-commerce Requirements
An e-commerce site is distinguished by having two or more of:
- Easy update and management of a product catalogue with prices, options, shipping costs, tax etc.
- An invitation to purchase a product or service
- "Shopping Cart" functionality
- A mechanism to receive payment on-line
- A shipping (fulfillment) mechanism, including notification of both buyer and seller.
This can be achieved in different ways:
E-commerce Shop Solution Review
PayPal for Simple E-commerce Purchases
Any website can be used to sell a few products using tools and services available from PayPal.
PayPal is an Internet payment service that acts much like an on-line bank. Anyone can get a payment account, backed by a credit card, and businesses can get facilities to accept payments. This can work at several levels:
- PayPal Website Payments Standard adds a "Buy Now" button enabling payment from a PayPal account or most credit cards. Payment is via PayPal's site. One button per product, unless you add a separate checkout system.
- PayPal Express Checkout - lets PayPal customers use postage and payment information previously stored by them with PayPal, so that they can check out in less than 3 clicks.
- PayPal Virtual Terminal - accept credit and debit card payments over the phone, by fax or email orders - you don't even need to have a website.
- PayPal Website Payments Pro, claimed to be a complete payment solution, with order processing on your site or PayPal's. Needs integration with your checkout process, and technical support. Not for inexperienced users.
Content Management Systems
But with more than a dozen or so products it is beneficial to have a site built on a database. This enables:
- Access to the content or product catalogue in many different ways, say by type of product, use, origin etc.
- Update of the content by a relatively unskilled user.
- Separation of the content and how it is displayed.
- The site look and feel can be changed completely via a theme template.
Two of the most widely used Content Management Systems (CMS) are Joomla and Drupal. Both are free, with large support communities and thousands of extensions. Of the two Drupal is probably the more flexible for e-commerce, though with a steeper learning curve for setup.
The Joomla CMS can be used with PayPal and Joomla extensions:
- Easy PayPal, for easier management of multiple Paypal buttons on the same page with different parameters, $10.
- PayPal Subscriptions Pro, automates recurrent subscriptions, $39.89.
or for full e-commerce:
- Simple Caddy shopping cart system. Looks good, well reviewed, simple. Uses Joomla's standard content management to present your products, and then links to PayPal via a shopping cart.
- (VirtueMart - too complex? poor reviews and support?)
But Joomla has a restricted two level hierarchy of Sections and Categories, limiting the ability to sort and view content (products) according to multiple criteria.
High End E-commerce Systems
For hundreds of products is is probably better to go for a specialised e-commerce system, preferably integrated with a Content Management System. You may need support for multiple currencies, taxes and shipping charges, plus special offers and trade discounts.
- e-Commerce, based on the Drupal CMS platform, promising full integration. It seems to do complete content management, shopping cart and order processing. It can use PayPal for payments direct or with any credit card.
- CRE Loaded shopping cart - claims to be the industry’s first downloadable ecommerce system that makes your store fully compliant with all Payment Card Industry (PCI) security rules (but you can get that via PayPal?). And no mention of content or product management - just a shopping cart? $175 or $416 full version.
- Zen Cart - another comprehensive shopping cart, claims to put the merchants and shoppers requirements first.
Other Approaches
- Some systems are available as online services, often sold and supported by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
- E-commerce extensions are available designed for use with Dreamweaver.
E-commerce Component Integration
You need to consider to what extent the following are integrated, in functional terms but also with regard the customer's experience.
- The catalogue of products, prices, shipping etc
- Other content on the website, eg articles
- The shopping cart
- Payment processing - on your site or PayPal's?
You can achieve integration by using one software application to do everything, or at the other extreme go for just consistent colours and a site logo.
Full seamless integration can take a lot of resources!
Related Pages
Further Information
Articles by Dr Wilson:
