Building a UK e-commerce site

[rskuse]

I've been building web sites for some time now but I've never before been asked to build an e-commerce site - Now I have two prospective customers asking for a quote!!

One requires a single credit card payment for a service they are offering and the other is an online catalogue offering 1000+ products.

I understand the general process of running an e-commerce site but where do I start?

Should I ask the customer to set up their own merchant account and work with that or should I be providing them with the best option for accepting online payments?

We are a reseller in the UK for Pair Networks and all our customer sites are hosted there. Pair offers the Americart service but i'm not sure this is the best option for UK merchants??

If anyone could offer me some advice on where to begin it would be very much appreciated.

Thankyou in advance for your help...

 

[CoreyBryant]

You might consider giving them a few CC processing web sites to review, but I would be very careful. If they apply & get approved & then find another processor a month later with lower rates they could (and probably) would blame you.

Not too familiar with that shopping cart, but there are tons of them out there. Figure out what they want & does Americart offer it? If not - check out

http://www.vbasp.com

or

http://www.oscommerce.com

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[oakgrove]

My approach is to have the client get the merchant account just as if they were going to accept charges in their (office/stort). I don't think you want to take responsibility for that part of their business. Just make sure they tell their bank they are going to take

http://WWW charges.

Oakgrove Computer Grouper
Lansing, MI

 

[weirb]

I was in the exact same situation as you about three months ago. My client wanted to set up a b2b website where his clients (wholesalers) could purchase directly from his website. His job was made a wee bit more complex because he wanted his prices to be hidden from the general public and only made available to registered users after logging in. I spent some time searching, downloading and evaluating ecommerce software and I eventually settled on the EROL shopping cart solution business edition at £389. (

http://www.erol.co.uk/).

This software is easy to use and very customisable. It even allows you to export to Dreamweaver, make changes and then import these back into EROL. I had to get them to make a change to the package to include hiding the prices until logon and they did this at a reasonable rate. The software is also fairly user friendly and my client, who is computer literate, is quite happy because he can make most of the changes and updates himself. He did in fact input most of his catalog which now amounts to about three to four hundred items.

I did not take responsibility for selecting the PSP, etc. All I did was point my client to sites on the Internet where he could get advice and he made his own choice.

For your client who only needs to take one payment, have you considered PayPal?

 

[dpk136]

what i have done is to show them the different things that they can go with. they can go with a merchant account or go to an online one, like Paypay or Stormpay. If you show them these and ask what they would like to do, then you are showing the initiative. if you do not want to create the whole shopping cart yourself, i would probably go with oscommerce. it's the best one that i've found.