How Online E-Commerce Works

Essentially a shopping cart is software that allows you to add/remove, manage and sell products. You can buy your own shopping cart software or use our CartXpress software at a monthly rate. Most shopping carts - including CartXpress - offer advanced statistics, flexibility and control over how your products are sold.

If you are only selling one or two products and you are just simply accepting cheques, money orders or cash, you probably don’t need a shopping cart. You should get a shopping cart if you have more than ten products.

There are essentially three steps you need to do if you want to setup e-commerce on your website. Naturally, the first step is finding the shopping cart software you will use to manage your products. The second step is securing the order process for your customers. You do this by using a SSL certificate. A SSL certificate securely encrypts sensitive information passed from your customer’s browser to you or a third-party merchant company.

We sell GeoTrust SSL certificates for:

1 year certificate $149.99
2 years certificate $229.99 ($115/year)
3 years certificate $299.99 ($100/year!)

The third and final step is to have a merchant account. To be able to accept credit cards and have those funds deposited into a bank, you will require a merchant account. A merchant account is offered by a third-party financial company who will process your credit card information and make deposits to your bank account.

Click here for a list of merchant companies.