E-Commerce and Online Stores

 

The number of businesses making use of the Internet as a shop is increasing dramatically. Putting all your eggs into this virtual shopping basket is risky, but having this as an additional outlet makes great commercial sense.

 

Fishscape Web and Graphic Design can help you sell to a wider customer base via two different types of online store:

 

Small online store

 

This is suitable for the sole trader with a relatively low number of products for sale. The small size of the stock means that a database is unnecessary. Payment is obtained from the customer via PayPal (using their secure server) or cheque; this means that no financial details are taken online and therefore a secure server is not needed to host the payment pages.

 

Medium/Large online store

 

This solution is based on the Oscommerce system, used by thousands of companies worldwide. It is very flexible and once set up can be maintained by the client with some initial instruction. It uses a MySQL database and can take orders via credit card, PayPal, cheque, etc. This requires a secure server plus the vendor having a credit card facility such as HSBC Secure ePayments or Barclaycard ePDQ Cardholder Payment Interface.