My Merchant Account Blog

Do I Do It Myself

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Usually when you want to start selling products - you have a few different options. Download a shopping cart and set it up. Or locate an ecommerce company that only does shopping carts. Or maybe hire someone to do it.

Some downloaded shopping carts are very easy and you just have an admin section to add your products and then you choose what electronic payment gateway that you want to use. Very simple, but what about your design? Can you incorporate that into the cart?

If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, chances are that you might not even know HTML. If this is the case, you will spend your valuable time trying to learn the basics and then you have to learn the server side language. This might take you weeks or most likely months. It would be cheaper if you hired someone to do the development work.

You can also use a company that hosts the cart themselves. The problem with this, you are usually tied to them for life. Moving to another hosting company or provider can prove to be very difficult. And if any changes are needed, you might have to shell out hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars, for those changes. Plus some of them take a percentage of your sale as well - so on top of paying the merchant account fees and the electronic payment gateway fees, you will be paying something to the shopping cart host.

For example, the LinkPoint Gateway (aka First Data Global Gateway) is very limiting to what is supported by a merchant account providers.  For some merchants, a hosted solution can be invaluable.  And for others, it can be very limiting - almost to the point of causing your business to lose money every month. 

So what do we recommend?  We recommend a shopping cart that you purchase (includes the source code), a hosting provider (like Techevolution) a merchant account through Mile High Merchant Account and the Quantum Gateway.  This way, as your business grows, Techevolution will be there to help you on the hosting side, a partner of CDGCommerce will be there on the processing side and the Quantum Gateway will protect you against fraudulent transactions.  No one else in the industry will be able to help you grow at a fast, secure, and stable rate.

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