E-Commerce Solutions

What if you want to sell something on your Web site? Again, tons of ISPs and IPPs are ready to offer you the basics of an e-commerce site, including SSL security, backend databases, credit-card accounts, and even prebuilt "shopping cart" applications to display your products and help your customers choose them and track them. If you find a reputable local or regional IPP that's willing to help you with your online store, use it if the deal seems right. In this section, I'll be focusing on a few lower-cost national solutions that might also be interesting.

Yahoo! Store

Yahoo! offers a service called Yahoo! Store (http://store.yahoo.com/), which promises a turnkey online store solution. The service walks you though the process of adding products, using templates, and even getting a merchant account for accepting credit cards. The cost is currently about $50 per month, plus some other fees, such as per-product listing costs. And in certain cases, Yahoo! gets a percentage of your sales when the customers are referred from other Yahoo! pages.

While the price structure may sound a little daunting, Yahoo! Store is fairly cheap for an e-commerce solution. Plus, you can apply for a listing in the Yahoo! Shopping channel, which could be a boon to your sales. Yahoo! Stores can be "built with a single click," according the Yahoo!, so it's worth consideration if you're looking to jump into an online store immediately.

Catalog.com

Catalog.com is another intriguing low-cost service for quickly putting together an e-commerce site. As part of its basic plan (currently $25), you get a fairly solid Windows-based hosting package. It includes access to CGI scripts and the ability to run your own scripts, Microsoft Access support, VBScript and FrontPage support, ODBC-compliant database support, and even some multimedia features such as RealAudio serving. (There's also a Unix-based package for the same price that substitutes mySQL, PHP, and Python instead of the Microsoft-specific features.)

The kicker, though, is the ability to list up to 50 products in an online catalog, accept credit card payments, and so on. You can pay more to list additional items, currently $10 per 1,000 items.

Your best bet is to sign on to the site and try out the demo store to see if it works for you. This will require a bit more customization and HTML know-how than a solution like Yahoo! Stores. Then again, thanks to this book, you have that HTML know-how already!

Oracle Small Business

Oracle Small Business (http://www.oraclesmallbusiness.com/) began life as NetLedger.com, an online application for managing small business accounting. Since then, it's grown into a tool for managing a small business that's completely online—or a traditional business with an online store—thanks to its module-based approach.

This approach is a little different, but it could be very interesting if you already own a small business. Oracle Small Business begins by replacing your current software-based accounting system (such as QuickBooks or Peachtree Accounting) with its online application. The advantage is that you don't need special server computers. The disadvantage is that you lose some control over your data. The online application is used for accounting, payroll, inventory management, and so on.

The really interesting part is how well the online store can integrate with the accounting software. Oracle Small Business claims that its Web store can be created "in a snap"—that's partly true because it can be populated automatically using your inventory records, and sales made on the Web site can be entered into your accounting system automatically. In fact, clients can access your online accounting system to check out their invoices and pay them online. For a basic Web store of up to 100 items, plus all the accounting, customer relationship, payroll, and inventory features, the service currently starts at $99 a month.

This solution is too complex to describe in a few paragraphs, but it's worth looking into if you're running a small business, you already have accounting issues or payroll headaches, and you think you're interested in a Web-based store.

Miva Merchant Servers

Although there are many, many different e-commerce server engines out there, Miva Merchant (http://www.miva.com/) stands out because it's popular with ISPs and IPPs that offer e-commerce as a value-added solution. Also, Miva is touted as an easy add-on for regular Web authors. In fact, one approach to using Miva is the Miva Now service, which offers what's essentially a hosted e-commerce store that you can set up and test for 30 days. You're then transferred to a Miva partner IPP if you opt to keep the store. Miva-enabled accounts begin around $30 per month.

Miva Merchant can be purchased for $595, but you'll likely use Miva through your IPP for a monthly fee. (ISPs and IPPs can run Miva Empressa, a platform for multiple Miva-enabled shopping sites.) You manage your store from your Web browser, making it fairly easy to administer. You can check statistics, track your inventory, and so on.

The Miva Merchant system also makes it easy to create an affiliate program, which is a popular way to drive business to your e-commerce site. Under an affiliate program, other Web authors (your affiliates) place advertisements for your store on their Web sites. When a user clicks an ad, the Web author gets credit, ranging from a small amount of money per click (usually a few cents) to a percentage of the sale. In a sense, it turns other Web authors into commissioned salespeople for the store.

Perhaps the most interesting component of the Miva line of servers is their support for Miva Script. It's a proprietary Web-scripting language that enables you to add HTML-like elements for interactive forms allowing feedback, user registration, and e-commerce shopping. Using Miva Script, you can either do the scripting yourself (which you'll want to do on some level) or add third-party scripts, including some fairly sophisticated offerings that enable you to manage an entire Web site, much as you would using Perl or PHP. For more on Miva Script, see http://www.ideablue.com/index.mv?Menu=MivaScript or http://www.miva.com.