First Time

[jtlloyd]

I have a potential client that would like to sell products online and would like to accept credit card payments online. I have found a host that supplies a Merchant account.

But my question is how difficult is it to set up an online store, ie, shopping cart & Credit Card payments. That is the only thing that is really stopping me. Can anyone point me to some good references on where I can find info on how to build an e-store.

[Jason]

While you do not need to be a serious programmer, you will need knowledge of cgi or php, as well as HTML in order to use a cart in an e-commerce environment. Most merchant providers (verisign.com, authorize.net, 2checkout.com, clickbank.com) have some sort of form or link that is easy to add data to (such as price and product name) from a database, but you will need to understand how to switch these variables (mostly HTML knowledge) which are supplied by the cart. You can find various carts here:

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/

http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/

I'd go through and download a free one, and install it. Most should come with a friendly way to insert payment gateway links, and offer instruction on what variables to replace. Some carts are even customized to certain payment gateways to make it easier, so once you've made your mind up on which payment gateway you will be using, you might want to find a cart which mentions it specifically.