Ecommerce Web Hosting

If you are thinking about setting up your own ecommerce website for a small/home business then choosing a good web hosting company is an important step toward success. What you will need might include product catalogs, a shopping cart, and payment processing.

Product catalogs

A good ecommerce web hosting company will provide access to an online database that will give your business an efficient and easy method of keeping an up-to-date product catalog. This database will most likely be MySQL based. Besides database access, you need a scripting language to communicate with the database. All common scripting languages, like PHP, ASP and JSP, can do this job just fine. Your hosting company will give you assistance with these scripts.

Shopping carts

Every effective online store has a shopping cart, so you need one, too. There are plenty of free shopping cart solutions available, and most ecommerce web hosting accounts come with one or more shopping carts available. Remember to consider how the shopping cart integrates with your product catalog.

Payment processing

Unlike other ecommerce necessities, this is normally not included with ecommerce web hosting. There are 2 main options. Get a merchant account and charge your customers’ credit cards yourself, or leave it to a 3rd party payment processor company. This is most often done without any involvement from the web host, but web hosting companies such as The Quantum Host will help you by recommending merchant accounts/payment processors such as PayPal.

If you are planning on getting a merchant account and processing the credit cards yourself, you need access to a secure server. A dedicated server is also an advantage, especially if you want to store your customers CC numbers. Dedicated servers are just far more secure than a shared server, and you don't want to be responsible for what happens if someone hacks into your server and steals the CC numbers you have stored.

Third party payment processing is easier, and you have less to worry about. It is easy to set up, and the CC processing company does all the hard work. On the downside, it is more expensive, and it looks less professional if some other company's name shows up on your customers CC bills. Make sure you tell your customers what is going to show up on their CC bills to avoid any charge-backs and confused customers.