Need steps to start sales on-line

[svoltmer]

Hello,
I am very confused as to what I need to have an e-commerce site. Lets say I have a website on a server allready. What are the next steps to being able to make sales transactions with credit card processing?

Ex. I am using GoLive. I can make the form data and insert it into the pages with the products, but what comes next? How do I process that information. I know I need a Merchant account and a payment gateway, but if I make the forms how does that tie in with the server that holds my site?

[peterdaly]

By your questions, I suggest you either look into a prepackaged shopping cart application, or hire an expert in ecommerce. There are a lot more issues from the standpoint of security, cart, and checkout that can get pretty complicated. Getting the credit card from a form is just the tip of the iceburg. The security aspects especially should not be taken on by a novice.

You may able to find a webhost that provides everything you need from a packaged cart standpoint. I know Miva Merchant is a popular package some hosting providers bundle with hosting. I am sure others are availble as well, that is the one that just happends to pop into my mind right now.

Getting hosting which includes a "cart application" managed by the hosting provider is the route I would suggest you look into.

You can also look into server side scripting languages, databases, ssl, etc. if you really want to go down the do it yourself road.

-Pete