ecommerce client booming

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From: "Patricia West"

Subject: STLWEBDEV: FW: Backend e-commerce help Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 17:27:42 -0500

I have a small business client who is expecting his on-line orders to dramatically increase, starting in September, because of partnerships he has developed. He sells a few products (maximum this year=8), but will have access to a very large, very targeted marketing group this fall. He will be receiving referrals from his partner sites, some of whom get over a million hits/day (don't know if those hits are unique visitors, however.) He now processes orders off-line and verifies credit cards with his bank's merchant account software. He is set up to handle large numbers of orders through his distribution center. He is currently hosted at earthlink.

So, how can we plan for 2,000 orders per week, or even 20,000 orders per week? I cannot provide scability or backend support. He needs to be able to totally automate his order receipt and processing, including credit card verification, and send the orders to his distribution center. He does not want to maintain his own servers. We need to work with someone who can develop a system for him that is reliable, easy to use, and cost-effective. If there is already software available to do what he needs, that would be fine.

Please contact me at wiz@websitewiz.com if you can help or know someone who can.

I will be doing the site design, page production, and site maintenance.

Patsy West

WebsiteWiz, LLC--Creative Web Site Solutions www.websitewiz.com wiz@websitewiz.com 314.993.4974

-- Anonymous, May 16, 2001

Answers

Since you're not sure of what you need, and the small volume of items, you might want to look into the PayPal service. It's relatively low cost, and probably scalable *enough* to get you through determining if you need your own system to handle the transactions or not. You could also look into any of the commercial "shopping cart" houses, e.g. digitalriver.com

The transaction fee rate is better than anything I could get setting up a small business with a local bank. Plus, you can accept PayPal payments from your site in addition to the traditional credit card types.

All in all, a low-risk option for meeting your near term needs. And you can even implement one-click purchasing for the items without even bothering with a shopping cart. It's possible to do this sort of e-commerce with just a plain static website - no cgi/servlets/ASP required.

PayPal has competitors that probably also offer similar services, but I think PayPal is currently the leader by a wide margin in that market. You can compare them at sites like epinions.com and such.

In fact, Send me a $1.00 if you want to try it out!

Mike808/ --

-- Anonymous, May 16, 2001


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