E-commerce

One of the more popular applications used on web sites is that of e-commerce, enabling the online sale of goods or services. In this situation it may well be advantageous to make use of a third-party service rather then develop the e-commerce application from scratch.

It is possible to link your web site into the e-commerce service offered by the third party in order to manage your product portfolio, provide the customer with the ability to select goods and place them in a ‘shopping basket’, and more especially handle the credit card payments. This also provides the benefit of secure payments without having to implement it on your own system. The disadvantage is that there will be limitations as to the amount of customisation you can undertake in order to integrate with your own site.

Example of such services are:

• WorldPay
• Netbanx
• ShopCreator

There are also software packages which allow you to develop your own e-commerce site. These are based on templates which can be altered to meet your own specific requirements. The resultant code and pages are then uploaded onto the server. It still requires some technical knowledge and skills but it is generally quicker and cheaper than bespoke development.

From the web hosting perspective it is important that any solution supporting the e-commerce service is run on a secure server. Security and trust are vital elements of any business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationship. If you are intending to use an ISP rather than develop an in-house solution then you will need to establish what secure server software, digital authentication service, electronic payment system provider and merchant software it runs.