Selling items online is known as "E-Commerce"; a catchy buzz-word for the process of putting up a
web page of items, getting paid for them, and shipping them out. Companies like Amazon.com do this
all the time, and you can too!
Things necessary for you to sell our products online:
- Web Pages
- Web Hosting
- Shopping Cart
- Payment Processing
- Merchant Account
- Order Export
Okay, so what do these things mean, in plain english?
These are just documents formatted in HTML (hypertext markup language), meant to be read in a web browser
like the one you're using right now. The "markup" part is what you do during document editing to tell the browser
where to show bold text, italic text, when to start a new paragraph, etc.
This sort of work used to require a programmer, but now there are now editors that make the process
as simple as editing letters in a word processor. Programs that allow you to edit web pages like this are
typically called WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get).
Some examples of these editors are
Adobe GoLive,
Microsoft Frontpage,
Macromedia Dreamweaver.
I can hear you saying to me right now, "those programs are expensive, isn't there anything cheaper!?!".
Sure there is! Many companies and groups of programmers have made WYSIWYG editors available for free!
An older, but still good editor is
AOLPress;
it's rather old, as editors go, being published in 1997. But for fairly simple pages, it still works fine.
A newer editor that handles more of the styling elements used commonly now is
NVU. It was originally based on the program code for
Mozilla Composer, but has now been upgraded to the code used in the
Mozilla Firefox browser.
To talk about some of the other free web page editors, we need to discuss "Web Hosting",
since several of these are part of the "web hosting" package offered by companies.
"Web Hosting" is the process of making your web pages available to other computers on the internet.
This is done by loading your web pages onto a specially configured computer connected to the internet.
This computer is called a "web server", meaning that it "serves" (sends) your documents to any other
computer that requests them.
Some "web hosting" companies do nothing more than provide the computers to put your web pages on.
Some also provide web based means of managing and editing web pages, and eliminate the need for you
to use a special program to create and edit your web pages.
One of the most common web-based page editors is Trellix;
this editor / management program is used by pay-for-hosting Internet Service Providers like
Earthlink and
Verizon. However Some free web hosting firms
also use Trellix, like Tripod and
FortuneCity.
This is a web-based program that allows customers to select items, add them to their list of purchases, and
at checkout, enter their addressing and payment information. This program is typically written in what's
called a "web scripting language" like ASP, PHP, etc. Yes, I know this alphabet soup sounds confusing;
what you need to understand about this is that you'll need to either write or purchase a cart program,
or choose a "web host" that provides one that's already installed. Fortunately, many web hosts do provide
this; simply select the right host to meet your needs.
This is the ability of the "shopping cart" program to receive and process credit card payments. Again,
many hosting firms provide this ability.
To enable you to authorize credit card purchases, process them, and collect the proceeds, you'll also need
a "Merchant Account". This is where "Payment Processing" puts the money you receive for your sales.
Unless you plan to ship the orders yourself, you'll need to send us those orders to fulfill for you! Most
hosting firms provide ways of downloading orders from your website so that you can send the file(s) direct
to us for fulfillment. ("Fulfillment" is a fancy way of saying 'package and ship' the items). All hosting
firms differ in how you download orders, so we can't cover this in detail here.
