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Shopping Carts and E-Commerce
This is the most complicated and varied subject to detail in a brief way. If you have E-Commerce thoughts, it would be best to discuss these with us in detail but here is a little preliminary information.
To sell a service or product thru your web site you will need an account with a Credit Card transaction processing company such as PayPal or Authorize.net to name two. They will process the online transactions for you for a small fee.
Online security is a big issue in most consumer's minds and to create a secure link between you, your customer and the transaction company, it is recommended that you have a SSL certificate so that you can make certain pages on your site that handle the shopping cart, secure. You may have noticed that on certain sites you visit, a message box pops up saying something like "You are now entering a secure site" and see a "lock" icon appear at the bottom of your browser window. These SSL certificates are somewhat expensive (several hundred dollars) although it may be possible to run a smaller site with a "Shared Certificate". Again this should be discussed in more detail.
 For a basic shopping cart, you can see the Reservations Page of Lookout-Inn (and click on the Reservation Form) which we have adapted to handle just one product, their reservations. This shopping cart has two payment options, PayPal and check by mail.
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 For a more comprehensive shopping cart you can seeChiapas Amber Creations. We have adapted the OS Commerce Shopping Cart and you can see how others have adapted this shopping cart to fit their products or services.
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