15 Minute Craft Website Tips  

If you want to sell your craft or your artwork directly from your own website, there are a number of things you need to put together to make it work. But with all of the different components to put together, how to pick something that's not too confusing or too expensive? In this episode I'll discuss what you need to do to turn your art website into a online web store.

E-commerce sites have all of these components:

1. Payment Service Provider- a payment provider allows you to take payments electronically

• Merchant account- this is a bank account that allows you to take credit card, debit card, or electronic check payments

• Paypal- this is an online service that allows you to take payments via credit card or bank transfer

2. Payment Gateway- a service that passes information from an ecommerce website to a payment service provider. A payment gateway encrypts credit card and other financial information to make sure that it passes securely from your website to the payment provider.

3. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - this is a way to encrypt or secure data that passes from your website to your payment gateway.

4. Shopping cart- this is software on your website that allows customers to collect items for purchase and then pay for them. Shopping carts calculates sales tax, shipping and handling, and product totals. Many shopping carts can also keep track of customer data, inventory, and many have some email marketing capabilities

• Ecommerce software- this is software that runs on a website. Most often, they're entire systems that also handles the look and feel of the entire website. Some examples include Miva, OScommerce, Zen Cart.

• Hosted shopping carts- these shopping carts are hosted on a shopping cart service instead of your website. When customer add something to their shopping carts, they are taken from your website to the shopping cart service.

How these components work together:

1. A customer visits your website and uses the shopping cart system to choose items to purchase. When they are ready to check out, the shopping cart calculates their total and the customer provides payment and shipping information.

2. The shopping cart sends the payment information to the payment gateway. The payment gateway passes the information to the information to the payment service provider.

3. The payment service provider authorizes the payment and sends the authorization to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then passes the authorization to the shopping cart, which releases the order to be processed by the merchant.

4. The payment service provider then sends the payment to you the merchant.

5. Transactions between the shopping cart, payment gateway, and payment provider are all protected through SSL.

Be sure to tune in to the next show to learn how to choose the best system for you!

Need more info? Check out this free guide and checklist on how to evaluate and choose the best shopping cart system for your website. You can download it for FREE here.