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.