Setting up an online store from Scratch

BarbedGarber

Hi folks,

Hope all are well. I hope I've come to the right place. For the past
while when searching for information I've repeatedly encountered the answers
to my questions at this site. Basically I'm in the process of setting up an
online store for my friends small home business. It's a store based in Ireland
but we're hoping that by putting together the store that we can go global!!!
Well. That's the plan.

In the past month I've researched what I think needs doing in order to have
as much control over the website and not have to pay through the nose for
it. I'm an I.T. developer myself and while I haven't extensive experience with
some of the technologies involved I've put together a small proof a concept
on my machine that lends me to believe that we don't really need to call in a
web guru to do the job.

I was hoping to come across a blog that went through someone else's
account of this process but as of yet I haven't. As such if anyone knows of
one I'd really appreciate someone pointing me in the direction of one. If not
then I will endeavour to document all trials and tribulations I encounter as I
go along and hopefully this could someday be a useful resource for someone
else in the same boat as myself.

This is just the initial post explaining the thought behind this thread. If you
think that the idea is good/bad/horrendous/redundant/a waste of the good
people on boards.ie's time then don't hesitate to let me know, I can take the
verbal smackdown. I went to a christian brother's school, sticks and stones
etc etc.

I'll explain in the next post of this thread, where I've gotten too at the minute
( eh not too far ) and where I'm thinking of going next in my quest to cybrify
the shop.

Thanks,
BarbedGarber.

BarbedGarber

In a pub far far away...

well Cork to be exact, a good friend asked me to help him setup his online store.
He has a fairly small business venture that he toils away at night and day out of the comfort
of his own home... well garage to be accurate. I readily agreed because while I've worked in
I.T. for a number of years I'd always worked on backend services with very little input into
the frontend of applications, having to resign myself to the fact that my lot was components/database
drivers classpaths and automated builds. Tired I am of the Frontend Illuminati taking all the credit
while simultaneously promulgating vicious propaganda about us backenders. Hmm backenders and there's
me strictly a breast man. Perhaps they had a point. Finally I wanted to stand up and say no more will
I be fed and paid through a hatch at the bottom of my office door, no more will small children point
at me on the street and say 'Mammy isn't that the guy who didn't know how to write a jsp page until
his fourth year in college!! Why is the light falling on his eyes like that??' So as such I decided
to dive headlong into the wily world of website development and e-business. "How hard could it be", I
asked myself, "I mean I know of a number of people who've got websites set up and are trading away without
any problem? There must be an out of the box solution that everybody uses and slightly amends to their needs.
And as for the banking side of things well the online shop thing has been done to death hasn't it? I'm sure
if I ring up any major Irish bank they'll be able to sort it all out for me in a few days and sure we'll be
trading before the end of the week." Please, please do not underestimate my propensity for naivety.

So far here's the lie of the land as I see it. If it pleases the board I'll go through these one by one.
Please if you read anything that you think is erroneous or down right stupid, don't hesitate to call me
names or point fingers but also I would ask you to briefly explain your position and any and all ways to
remedy the problem. Once the thread is complete I will go through everything and consolidate it into as
helpful a resource as possible, crediting those that contributed positively as I go ( i'll also mention
the REALLY good put downs...) In order to have a fully functioning/trading online store ye need the following
( in order of appearance )

Domain name registration
Web site Hosting
eShopping Cart product
Payment Gateway Processor
Merchant account

Domain name registration
========================
After looking around for a bit and taking the advice of a good friend, who already has an online store
with quite a bit of traffic himself, I took a look at the goDaddy.com website. I remembered the site
from the t.v. ads ( ahem see above ) so I figured they are kosher enough. From what I can tell the domain
registration for a .com is about 9 dollars per year. Sounds about fair enough so it does.

Web site Hosting
===================
From what I can tell there's three types of hosting Shared, Virtual Private Server, and Dedicated Server.
I think for what we're trying to achieve and because I like to meddle we're gonna go with the Virtual Private
Server. We don't expect much in the way of traffic for the first two-three years ( aiming for about 50 txns
a week by the end of year 1 ). GoDaddy provide this Virtual Private Server service with a simple control
panel for accessing our account. Quoting from their website as per the 8th of May 2007,

for 12 months @ $25.49/mo we get

• 10GB disk space • 500GB bandwidth
• Linux: CentOS 4
• Simple Control Panel
• FREE! SSL Certificate, a $19.99 value!
• FREE! $25 Google® AdWords® credit

I'm really not too sure if we need all that space to be honest but it's the most vanilla setup that I came
across on their site. Also from what I've read the Google AdWords facility really isn't all that it's cracked
up to be.

eShopping Cart product
=======================
Right at this stage ye've probably realised that we're trying to do this on as much of a shoestring as poss.
If not then make no mistake we is cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. The fact that me mate asked me is indication enough
that there ain't much in the way of flash money to be thrown around. I originally requested to be paid in crates
o' grog. He looked at me crooked, not because of my method of recompense but because I'd the nerve to suggest
that a crate would be the smallest unit of payment.

I'm hoping to develop the whole shop on my local machine so that when finally the time comes to go live I can just
copy it up to my host server that will have all the necessary application servers/languages and databases installed.
Then after a few days/weeks of integration testing and throwing through a few orders well be ready to go. For this I
needed a free shopping cart.

After further extensive research i.e. typing 'free online shopping cart' into google, I came across the OsCommerce
solution. I'm sure there are many of you out there who having done this a million times before are slapping yer foreheads
with the palm of your hand with yer tongues bulbing your lower lip at my immense "discovery" of the OsCommerce project.
Eureka wha??? To be honest that's fair enough but please keep in mind this is all being done from scratch and at I'm still
working on the basis that getting this sorted out won't be an impossible task. Having said that somewhere at the back of my
mind there's a gag-ball in the gob of the synapse that knows in year or two's time I'll be saying, 'If I'd any idea of the
amount of hassle I'd have had to go through to get this up and running I never would have bothered'.


So I downloaded the OsCommerce website to my machine and went about installing Php, mysql, apache and finally phpMysqlAdmin
onto my machine. I've integrated servers with dbs on a number of occasions before but dagnamit no matter how hard I tried,
getting the php installation to pick up the dlls that would allow me to access the mysql db was just not happening. Finally
after about two days of feckin' around with paths and dll locations I threw in the bloodied towel and went back to the Oracle
(google) to demand cookies, explanations and an easy work around. Irrevocably, concordantly, vis-a-vis,
the no-spoon solution came in the form of the free WAMP integrated product. After the default
installation which includes, PHP5 through apache to a mysql database, complete with PhpMysqlAdmin I was able to
Copy the OsCommerce's catalog folder into the document root directory
Amend my hosts file ( I'm working on NT. Dun dun Duuhhhhhhnnn1!!) so that a domain name would resolve to 127.0.0.1
Follow the OsCommerce installation guide for a few pages

Once this was done well I was able to access the shopping cart locally, create a new catalog, add items to the catalog
and attempt to run through the payment process for the catalog. This was in fairness a huge boost of confidence to the
proceedings as I truly thought to get to even that stage would take blood, sweat, tears and promises of first borns.

So all in all we're looking to go with the OsCommerce solution.
I'm gonna develop it all locally and then we're gonna host it via goDaddy.

Payment Gateway Processor & Merchant Accounts
================================================
If ye've read down this far and have already thought to yourself this guy hasn't a clue what he's doing and is in for the
shock of his life then eh.. bite yer lip cos this is the section where even I think I haven't a bean.
Many synapses, myriad assorted multi-coloured cortex gag-balls and medulla oblongata gobstoppers.

So the OsCommerce stuff comes complete with credit card processing functionality. Well the server-side of this is available
anyways. I stumbled across a couple of sites that explain Payment Gateways and merchant accounts quite well. www.ourshop.com
was probably the most useful. They explained the concepts and gave a rundown of what you should expect and also questions you
HAVE to get answers to when thinking of going with a payment gateway/Merchant account providers. They explained things like
Txn cost versus Discount cost. ( We'll be selling low cost products at hopefully high volumes ) so for us we would want to
go with the txn cost. Also they suggested a number of solutions for this. Unfortunately as we're based in Ireland and because
we're not too sure what we're doing we're going to go with ( rotten veg at the ready. Not the face!! Please not the face!! ) a solution from either AIB
or Bank Of Ireland. My current and business accounts are both with BOI and I've always been happy with their service.

I'll hopefully be talking to an agent from EuroConex in the next few days and will post how I get on.

EDIT : I talked to a guy from EuroConex this morning. Sound man. Gave me the heads up.
Looks like they (EuroConex) provide the merchant account and Realex are the payment service provider.

For EuroConex it looks like its
200 euro enrollment fee
2.5% discount rate i.e. 2.5% of the item sold.
Monthly minimum of 30 euro for discounts.


For Realex
He couldn't give me an exact cost break down but said the txn fees would be in the region of 40/50c.

Worryingly he mentioned that getting a merchant account can be quite an arduous task. Anyone any experience they could
share?

So in summary, it's looking like

Domain name registration - GoDaddy.com
Web site Hosting - GoDaddy.com
eShopping Cart product - OsCommerce
Payment Gateway Processor - Realex
Merchant account - EuroConex

If anyone has done this before or has could guide us in any way should they feel were going down the wrong road with this
or can spot any huge potholes down the line please just throw it out there, there's no negative comments.

Thank you kindly,
BarbedGarber.

mneylon

If you are targetting the Irish & European market you should seriously look at getting hosting in Ireland or at least Europe.

nikimere

[Edit] never mind. i should have read your posts completely but i couldn't...

smcelhinney

Who would read all of this?

whats the question?

EDIT: sorry, insensitive I know. But whats the key points. Are you asking for a how-to? Or seeking professional help?

BarbedGarber

nikimere wrote:

[Edit] never mind. i should have read your posts completely but i couldn't...

That's grand Nikimere. I realise that there's a lot there. I originally posted in the blogs, podcasts and wikis section as I thought it was a blog site but my post seems to have been moved.

BarbedGarber

smcelhinney wrote:

Who would read all of this?

whats the question?

EDIT: sorry, insensitive I know. But whats the key points. Are you asking for a how-to? Or seeking professional help?

Not at all, smcelhinney, if this is the wrong place for this kind of post then don't hesitate to say. It was originally posted in the blogs, podcasts and wikis area but was moved here.

I was hoping maybe someone who has gone through the same rigmarole as I'm about to would have documented it.

There's five sections really and I've suggested the routes which I'm thinking of taking with each. I was hoping that if anyone has experience with all or any of these sections that they could indicate whether or not they feel I'm on the right track.

BarbedGarber wrote:

So in summary, it's looking like

Domain name registration - GoDaddy.com
Web site Hosting - GoDaddy.com
eShopping Cart product - OsCommerce
Payment Gateway Processor - Realex
Merchant account - EuroConex

nikimere

I have an osCommerce package with Blacknight.
It comes free and they even have a nice installation script so all i have to do is click some buttons, after about 60 seconds i have a functioning shop.
osCommerce also comes with a paypal plugin which can be installed in about 30 seconds.
There you go, my experience documented

BarbedGarber

blacknight wrote:

If you are targetting the Irish & European market you should seriously look at getting hosting in Ireland or at least Europe.

Any suggestions on better alternatives ?? Blacknight.ie perhaps?
How would you guys compare to the likes of goDaddy? I'd much prefer to
give the business to an Irish company of course I just haven't encountered too
many.

BarbedGarber

nikimere wrote:

I have an osCommerce package with Blacknight.
It comes free and they even have a nice installation script so all i have to do is click some buttons, after about 60 seconds i have a functioning shop.
osCommerce also comes with a paypal plugin which can be installed in about 30 seconds.
There you go, my experience documented

Nikimere, that you kindly, this is very helpful. Mind if I ask, do you only accept
payment through paypal? Would you know if Blacknight have credit card
support incorporated in their hosting? I came across a few posts that were of
the thinking that most of the sales they do is via credit cards.
Here's one such post.

BarbedGarber

Hey Nikimere,

Would you be able to indicate who you went with for the Payment Gateway and for the merchant account? Did you encounter any trouble getting the merchant account. According to the guy I was talking with from EuroConex it's not a trivial matter by any account.

Thanks,
Mark.

smcelhinney

BG,

AFAIK, PayPal can accept credit card details WITHOUT having a PayPal account. Think this page explains it https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside

Also, this page has PayPal contributions to osCommerce, Im sure you'll find what you're looking for here..

http://www.oscommerce.com/community?contributions=&search=paypal&category=1,

I believe this one is the most widely used.

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,3647

In fact, I've ALSO been looking for one of these, but been just too damn lazy..

Thanks BG!!

nikimere

I used paypal completely.
The paypal account i used is attached to the clients business bank account.
Payments are all made via paypal, even if you do not have a paypal account you can supply credit card details to paypal and they sort it all out.

BarbedGarber

nikimere wrote:

I used paypal completely.
The paypal account i used is attached to the clients business bank account.
Payments are all made via paypal, even if you do not have a paypal account you can supply credit card details to paypal and they sort it all out.

smcelhinney wrote:

AFAIK, PayPal can accept credit card details WITHOUT having a PayPal account. Think this page explains it https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/websc...erview-outside

Folks,

I knew I'd find answers here!!! I've had a quick look at that site there and
if what it says is kosher and I'm sure it is then I can cut out the merchant
account and the payment gateway!!! This is an incredible!! folks yer
geniuses.. genii?? geneaux?? I can't thank you enough!!

mneylon

BarbedGarber wrote:

Any suggestions on better alternatives ?? Blacknight.ie perhaps?

Yes and no.

If you use a .com domain you should host in Ireland if you want to target the Irish market. There are a lot of reasons for this

BarbedGarber wrote:

How would you guys compare to the likes of goDaddy?

We're not a faceless behemoth

BarbedGarber wrote:

I'd much prefer to
give the business to an Irish company of course I just haven't encountered too
many.

Have a look at the sticky at the top of this forum - you'll find a list of Irish hosting providers

BarbedGarber

Hey Blacknight thanks for the response.

blacknight wrote:

If you use a .com domain you should host in Ireland if you want to target the Irish market. There are a lot of reasons for this

Would you know where I can go through these reasons?

blacknight wrote:

We're not a faceless behemoth

Hah! Good use of behemoth.

blacknight wrote:

Have a look at the sticky at the top of this forum - you'll find a list of Irish hosting providers

Thanks I spotted that the other day which is how I came across blacknight.ie.

nikimere

BarbedGarber wrote:

Would you know where I can go through these reasons?

One of the biggest reasons for me would be when people search for "Pages from Ireland" on Google. This search is based on the geographical location of the webserver, so, if you host in Ireland you'll be indexed under this, if not, you wont.

BarbedGarber

nikimere wrote:

One of the biggest reasons for me would be when people search for "Pages from Ireland" on Google. This search is based on the geographical location of the webserver, so, if you host in Ireland you'll be indexed under this, if not, you wont.

To be honest the shop won't cater to a strictly irish market. There will probably
be an irish section for which we might have a second domain locally hosted.

My friend signed up with hostireland.com. Anyone any experience with these
guys. I'd a look at their packages and they seem to support PHP4 but not 5.
Is 5 required for the current version of OsCommerce?

BarbedGarber

smcelhinney wrote:

http://www.oscommerce.com/community?contributions=&search=paypal&category=1,


http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,3647

In fact, I've ALSO been looking for one of these, but been just too damn lazy..

Thanks BG!!

Dead on Smcelhinney! It looks like we're gonna be going down this road.
Would you have any ideas as to whether the Website Payment Pro is
considerably better than the Standard? From what I can see the only
diff between them is the fact that the customer will navigate away from
our website?

I mailed a colleague who's had a number of sites trading away for the past
while and he had this to say in response.

my mate wrote:

If that is true about Paypal, that people in Ireland do not
need to set up a paypal account, then that is sweet. The problem we had,
even up to recently, was that anyone using paypal in Ireland had to enter
their credit card number, paypal would charge them $1, customer would wait
for their creditcard bill, go back to the paypal site and enter a code that was
in the transaction on the credit card bill, then paypal would accept the
transaction. In other words, it would take anywhere up to a month for the
customer to complete the transaction. If that has changed its great and
saves a lot of hassle. I haven't read the spiel about it, but it would be
interesting to see if fraud prevention is then passed on to the site owner, as
opposed to paypal who traditionally looked after it.

Would you guys know if this is true about the $1 surcharge?

Also from what I've seen of the Website Payment service on that link
you sent on SMcE is it fair to say that there's no longer the kind of rigmarole
that my mate's talking about above.

mneylon

BarbedGarber wrote:

To be honest the shop won't cater to a strictly irish market. There will probably
be an irish section for which we might have a second domain locally hosted.

My friend signed up with hostireland.com.

They don't have Irish servers

BarbedGarber wrote:

I'd a look at their packages and they seem to support PHP4 but not 5.
Is 5 required for the current version of OsCommerce?

You don't need php5 for OSCommerce

comer_97

hostireland use rackspace and are located in the UK

BarbedGarber

comer_97 wrote:

hostireland use rackspace and are located in the UK

Thanks comer_97 for the heads up. does it really matter what they use?
I mean it's only a small online store. It's not going to be too graphics intensive
at the beginning.

axer

BarbedGarber wrote:

Thanks comer_97 for the heads up. does it really matter what they use?
I mean it's only a small online store. It's not going to be too graphics intensive
at the beginning.

But why would you go with hostireland when you can use someone like blacknight or hosting365 for cheaper?

jessie_pinkman

anyone know where to find the irish hosting providers list?

KonFusion

You can find the list here.

Also, please don't post in very old threads. Thanks.

Locked.