... to the blog of Edith Karnitsch and Rhea Anthony aka TerraNetwork!
It’s hard to believe but around the time of the Millenium there were only two types of shopping cart software available – Actinic or custom coded in-house software specifically tailored to the needs of that particular company selling online. Neither option was cheap but the latter option was only available to big companies with big pockets. Yes, there were also HTML websites with Pay Pal “Buy Now” buttons – but this is not “shopping cart software”.
Sage Pay is a UK payment processing service (formerly known as ProtX). In short, they handle the credit/debit card collection and authorisation process on behalf on online businesses.
SagePay is used by many shops I’ve built and they provide a reliable service with realistic fees. They’re usually top of my list when customers ask for a recommendation. An additional benefit is that they’re developer-friendly (good integration guides and test environment).
www.sagepay.co.uk - the new home for ProtX
We’ve worked with many start-ups over the past years and it’s always great to see a new shop succeed and grow. But not all shops make it and this can be very tough on the owner. So before you empty your savings account, read our 5 tips & make sure your money is well spent.
Anybody selling online will need to settle one question: Which shopping cart system do I choose? Googling in this case will not help – for one simple reason: there’s no “one best cart” out there. But there is the right cart for you. And we’ve got 7 simple steps to get you there.
7 steps:
1. Have a business plan
2. Put together a list of requirements
3. Research payment systems
4. Decide on who does what
5. Look into the future
6. Make your choice
7. Test, test and test again
The following new osCommerce modules are available: Reports Package, Cross Sell Manager, and Attribute Manager including templates, sort order and bulk application. [...]
Taking payments online is the heart of each eCommerce site. If your customers can’t pay you, then your shop loses its purpose.
In this series, we want to focus on which payment processor to choose. The review is from a UK perspective and offline methods (bank transfer, cheque) are not covered, although for some sites they can be useful (B2B customers often prefer offline payment).
A payment processor takes care of the card processing. If you’ve got a shop with a terminal for putting through cards, then you may wonder whether you need one. And yes, you do! Don’t ever be tempted to store card details yourself and put them through manually.
Card processors can roughly be divided into the ones where you also need an internet merchant account (IMA) from a bank (e.g. ProtX) and those where you only need an account with payment processor (e.g. PayPal). We’ll be talking more about IMAs in later posts.
In our work we often get asked advice about which cart to choose, which payment provider to choose and generally best practices when it comes to selling online. This is where we think this blog can help – to pull together our thoughts on how to sell online and be a resource both for businesses and developers.
So enough waffle, let’s get it started!
