Ecommerce With Quality Budget Hosting and Free Software Solutions
Author: Adam Sullivan
Want to have an online store but can't pay the fifty bucks a month or more for a real ecommerce hosting solution? Why not get your store and take credit card payments for under ninety dollars a year?
So you have something you want to sell right? Ebay is good and every other marketplace online, and there are thousands of them, but you just want your own little e-store. You want to experiment and learn some things and maybe make a little or even alot of money but the common ecommerce hosting solutions are a bit out of your desired price range.
In this article I will quickly go over some easy and very affordable choices you have to get to your intended goal. These choices will be based on a combination of good, quality budget web hosting and a couple of the many free ecommerce software solutions out there.
An easy and free way to take credit card payments online is to get a paypal account. Paypal provides many solid services to online merchants and is easily the most popular online payment gateway available. They offer integration with ebay auctions as well as buttons for people to purchase things from you and also a fully customizable shopping cart. Go to www.paypal.com to find out more.
If you only have a few products to sell Paypals shopping cart may work well for you. You can just stick pictures and information about your products on a web site and add Paypal buttons for each product.
Certain hosting providers have a spot on their hosting control panels to easily install ecommerce scripts. With the click of a mouse you can have a full featured ecommerce solution ready to add your products to. Usually this includes stuff like product reviews, new products, specials, paypal or other payment gateway integration and news letters.
One of my favorite free ecommerce scripts is called osCommerce. Most web hosting companies provide easy installation for this. Good web hosting is usually between $70 and $120 a year. Add a payment solution like Paypal to this and some good products and you have your site. Now you have to market it. Thats another article altogether though.
