Creating a Store
If you are planning to sell something from your website, you have to establish an online shop. There are several choices available, depending on the number of items in your shop and used payment schemes.
Shopping Idioms
The items can be set to be purchased in two different manners. If there are only a few items or the customer buys almost always only one item at a time, the item can be bought directly. In this scenario, the customer clicks the item and the site asks the customer to fill out a form for shipping and payment details.
If the selection is big and the customers are encouraged to buy more than one item at a time, the direct model is not good as it tends to drive the customers to checkout after first product is purchased. Instead a shopping cart idiom should be used. Customers pick the items to the cart and when they have shopped enough, they proceed to check-out to fill out the payment and shipping information.
The customer should be able to place the same item several times to the cart and remove items from the cart. In some implementations, the cart holds it contents over sessions, thus when the customer returns to the site, the cart contains the items left there last time.
If the customers are expected to return the shop and make a new purchase, the customer details could be stored to a database for easier resale. The details are usually protected by a user account and a password. When purchasing or implementing a shopping system with user accounts, remember to check the local laws in order to know what information may be stored in the database without privacy violations.
Getting the Money
A credit card is the most usual choice for billing the customer. You can either take care of the credit card clearing by yourself (and spend countless hours in integration and tackling all e-business security requirements from credit card vendors), use some automated interface or buy the service from a third party.
PayPal and similar companies are good choices for smaller business as they have very simple interfaces to start the business. Note that their commissions are typically slightly higher than those of credit card clearing companies.