How to Setup an ECommerce Webshop - II

3. E-Commerce Software

Now that you have your domain name and you have your server (or hosting service) and the two works correctly together you need to consider which eCommerce webshop software to run, as mentioned previously there are two main directions to go in i.e. you could either decide on Windows or Linux Once you've made the decision of the operating system then you have a huge choice of the different Webshop software and these can range from free software (with limited support) through to software which costs thousands of pounds per year.

There are some very good free applications available such as Magento Webshop and OsCommerce but generally with these you'll be on your own when it comes to installing and running the software.

You'll then need to install and configure your software to get it looking exactly the way that you want it to. As well as the layout you will probably also need to do things like setup your payment methods, delivery options, countries that you want to deal with and tax codes.

4. Site Security

There are two aspects to this -

1. You need to prevent your site from being hacked and your customer's details from being stolen. In the UK generally you need to be registered under the data protection act which sets certain standards on how the data is protected.

2. You also need to make sure that whenever your customers type in sensitive data such as passwords or credit card numbers that there is a layer of encryption between your customer's PC and your web server, so that nobody can be watching the data which is being routed to your server to capture the credit card numbers etc. To make this happens you need to make sure that your server can support an SSL connection and you need to purchase and install a certificate onto the server which will re-assure your customers that this secure connection is happening.

How to Setup an ECommerce Webshop - I

You've made the decision to set up your own Webshop and you've got the products that you want to sell but how do you go about it? Where do you start?

There are several different aspects that you need to consider, the main ones are -

1. Domain Name

To go back to basics a domain name is the name by which your site is known on the web, when you type in the www address of the website that you want to visit you are typing in that site's domain name.

To have your own Webshop you must first purchase your own domain name, then you need to associate that domain name with a physical ip address on the internet, which leads me nicely onto.

2.Hosting the Site

The software for your Webshop needs to physically reside on a computer which can be accessed via the internet, once you've chosen your software it needs to be running 24 hours a day on a computer somewhere.
Here you have the choice of whether you run your Webshop on a dedicated server or you can share space on a server with other websites. But whatever you choose you also need to be able to associate your domain name with the physical (ip address) of your server i.e. the dns settings, this would normally be managed by whoever registered the domain name for you but you do need to be careful with this as it could badly affect the smooth running of your Webshop, its really important that whenever somebody types in your domain name (url) that your website is ALWAYS available.

You also have the choice of whether to run on a Linux Server or a Windows Server, in general there are more options available for Linux and as another generalization software for Linux is available at a lower cost than Windows software, but as in all things though there are exceptions and there is some very good windows software available at competitive prices.

You also need to make sure those things like database backups are taken care of and that you can load site certificates etc.