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The online FAQ database contains hundreds of answers to frequently asked questions, articles on using our
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I am interested in using one or more of XCENT's web server applications to start my own eCommerce web site. What else do I need besides the XCENT software? Basically, can you tell me how do I start my own eCommerce site?
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Starting your own eCommerce site can be a rewarding experience. To do it effectively, you should be prepared for allot of learning experiences along the way. Some experiences along the way may seem tough or difficult, but you will certainly gain a great feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction in making your site work, as well as hopefully building a successful online business. Below are the basic overall steps necessary for a new startup looking to create a dynamic eCommerce site.
Obtain Your Domain Name
Almost everyone that's ever seen a computer knows what a domain name is now. A domain name is the memorable name us human beings use to go to web sites on the internet. It might seem obvious that you want to be sure your domain name is something easy to remember, but even more importantly is making sure it is something that most people will be able to spell and type correctly. If you wind up choosing a domain name that is a little tough for some people to spell, you might also want to try to get the domain names that would be common misspelling for your name. This way, you can catch the people who might get frustrated too easily if they cannot type it right on the first or second try. Or, more importantly for any site that does become popular is so that some unscrupulous person does not try to grab the misspelled domain names to try to "steal" some of your potential users. Pricing on domain names varies, but you will usually spend in-between $8 to $35 per year per each domain registration. As far as the registration itself goes, no one registrar is better than another, as they all use the same centralized domain registry databases to record your public registration information. The difference usually comes in the type of support and online tools that each registrar provides. Since most registrars provide tools that let you manage your domain names right on their web site, the differences are usually only noticeable once you gain experience or start managing a number of different domains. Ironically, pricing here does not seem to matter too much, as some of the most expensive registrars seem to have the worst services and support.
Obtain Reliable Hosting For Your Site
A web server application depends on the web servers and database servers for making sure it runs reliably and performs well. If your site is installed on a web server that is already overloaded, it will not perform well. Any installed web server application can only perform as well as the servers that are running the site. So, it is important to make sure you choose a hosting solution that will provide you with good reliable service. The best way to do that is make sure the ISP or web host you choose has some familiarity with hosting web server applications and not just plain static HTML based web sites. When it comes to hosting services, generally the most inexpensive hosting companies probably do not provide the best level of services. Most of the hosting companies that are of average pricing will generally provide a much higher quality of service than most of the lowest cost options.
As part of choosing a reliable hosting solution, you will want to confirm if your potential host provides support for any required add-in components. ASP web servers use a technique of installable components on the web server to allow the ASP web server applications to perform more sophisticated features or work more efficiently. XCENT's web server applications can take advantage of a number of different add in components in order to offer some more advanced and useful features. Most ISP's or web hosts that have experience hosting ASP web server applications will usually have a very good cross section of installed components available on their web servers. Many ISP's make this information available right on their web site, while some make you have to ask for it. If a particular ISP does not support any installable components, they may not be an ideal choice for hosting an ASP web server application, as they probably do not have much experience hosting web server applications. To verify if your chosen ISP supports all the possible features in XCENT's web server applications, you can use the freely downloadable XcDiag script available from http://www.xcent.com/downloads/ and run it on the web server to verify what supported components it does have installed. Or, if you need assistance determining if your chosen ISP supports all the feature requirements of XCENT's web server applications, just ask XCENT sales or support by emailing the URL of the ISP you want to evaluate. XCENT does not provide any of these installable third-party components as part of our applications.
A reliable ISP will probably already have one or more of the many components of each type needed for all the features of XCENT's applications, and you usually do not need to be concerned with licensing or installing these yourself. This is particularly true when you are using either a shared web server or a dedicated managed server. A shared web server is when your ISP has one (or more) web servers that host multiple sites. You site may just be one of many sites being hosted on that particular server. When your site becomes more popular, or you want to increase your site performance or security, you may opt to move up to a dedicated managed server. With this type of arrangement, your ISP will dedicate a single server solely to your own use - no other sites except your own will be hosted on this server. Typically most ISP's will provide the same options for installable components on their dedicated managed servers that they do with their shared web server. Only once you start moving to dedicated co-located servers, or providing hosting on your own servers connected via some sort of high speed connection, do you normally have to be concerned with licensing or installing any optional third-party components. In that case, there are free versions of many of these components, and the actual licensing costs are very reasonable.
Pricing on hosting solutions can vary significantly. Business quality shared hosting usually starts at around $15-30 per month and goes up depending on other services or options you might need. If you have a busy site, or require lots of bandwidth, you should expect to pay more. Business quality dedicated managed hosting usually starts at around $250 per month and can go up quite significantly based on any other services or options you might need. Co-location costs can vary significantly and may be regionally price sensitive. Many ISP's may also charge a setup fee for any initial services and these tend to vary.
Choose An Appropriate Database Backend
XCENT's web server applications support different types of database backends. The currently supported backends are either a Microsoft JET database (JET), or a Microsoft SQL Server database (MS-SQL). JET databases are good for small sites that are just starting out, small personal sites, or sites that do not expect allot of simultaneous traffic from multiple users. JET is a good choice for sites like this because it is basically a free option. All IIS web servers will natively support JET databases. When a JET database is outgrown, you can migrate your site up to a Microsoft SQL Server database. An MS-SQL database is a good choice for sites that expect allot of user traffic, allot of data, or want the best in reliability, speed, and security for their system. An MS-SQL database can be hosted on a shared server, or a dedicated server. Most good ISP's will offer a variety of options for hosting MS-SQL server databases. If you are hosting on shared or dedicated web servers, your ISP probably offers choices in shared or dedicated MS-SQL hosting also. MS-SQL server databases usually will incur additional hosting fees. The actual amount will typically be dependant on the amount of data you may store in the database. Fees for SQL database hosting vary, but you can usually expect to add an additional $10-20 per month for a 30-60Mb database. The size of a database does vary depending on the number of user accounts, active data, and historical data you keep online in your site. For most installations using a MS-SQL databases, a 10-20Mb database should be a minimum starting point for XCENT's web server applications. A clean installation may start off with about an 8Mb database, even though there is almost no data in the database yet. This is due to the way MS-SQL works. It pre-allocates space so that when data is added, it can write it out faster than trying to add space in real-time as data is being written. So, even if your empty MS-SQL database starts out being 8Mb in size, the size of the database will not start increasing until a good bit of data has been added to it.
Setting Up Billing Options
XCENT's web server applications are flexible and provide a variety of ways to bill your end users various fees and such. To actually collect payments from your users, you have a variety of options. Also, keep in mind that XCENT's web server applications are very flexible and you can actually use any one or combination of these methods.
At the most basic level, you can manually bill users using any manual billing method you want. This can range from physically creating and mailing out invoices and receiving manual payments back via check; or, manually running credit card transactions via a credit card terminal or by phoning in transactions via a merchant account. Using manual billing methods requires a number of individual steps and some time, but allows a quick and simple way to get started for very low volume sites. Once a manual payment is received, you simply apply the payment to each end user's account as you receive and process each payment.
A step above manual billing would be by using automatic Email Invoices. This is used if you want to automate your billing process more than manual processing allows, and it still provides a low cost entry for collecting payments. You would actually request your end users to submit the payment via PayPal, NoChex, or some other method of manual remittance by sending them a request for payment via an electronic invoice. If you use PayPal or NoChex, your end user's can send you the payment electronically. If you use PayPal and have a verified account, you can turn on PayPal's IPN feature and the software will automatically apply payment credits to the end user's account without any manual steps per each transaction on your part. If you use NoChex, you can request to use their APC feature and have the software automatically apply payments received via NoChex directly to the end user's account without any manual steps per each transaction. Getting a PayPal or NoChex account is a no or very low cost option for collecting payments for many low to medium volume sites.
To completely automate your billing process, and to collect your payments on demand, you would want to bill your end user's via a credit card directly. With automated billing, you do not have to wait for the payment to be sent by your users, you just collect the payment directly from the credit card account the user has on record with your site. To do this, you need a merchant account with a supported Online Processing Gateway. An Online Processing Gateway is a service that performs credit card transactions on your behalf via an online system that your web site can interface directly to. XCENT's web server applications support a number of different Online Processing Gateways and you can get an account with any one of these. Costs do vary for the different gateway providers. Typically there is a setup fee, and a monthly fee, as well as per transaction costs associated with using a gateway. Pricing does fluctuate and is likely to be based on your volume and business, so be sure to check with each of the gateway vendors for the current pricing information on their services. See our FAQ article #338 for the most up to date list of the currently supported online processing gateways that the XCENT web server applications support. Typical pricing for many gateways may be something along the lines of: $100-200 setup fee; $20 per month minimum fee; $0.45 plus 3% per transaction.
Acquiring and Setting Up SSL
If you will be running an eCommerce site where you will be collecting billing data from your site users, you want to help secure their sensitive data by using an SSL certificate on your site. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. SSL will encrypt the transactions occurring between your web site and your end user's web browser. By encrypting the information traveling back and forth to a particular user, an eavesdropper cannot intercept and use any of the sensitive billing information that the user is entering into your site. This protects your end users and any responsible site operator should be using SSL if collecting billing data from their end users. To use SSL on your web site, you need to get an SSL Certificate for your domain. Obtaining a certificate is a simple process, but can seem confusing to some due to the terminology used. A certificate is really nothing more than a really large number (actually two large numbers). When you are ready to get an SSL certificate, you have your ISP generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for you. The CSR is sent to a Certificate Authority (CA). The CA looks at your CSR to see if it is legitimate. Basically, when you create your CSR, you are asking the CA to vouch for your identity to your end users. Once the CA has verified your identity, they will issue the actual certificate to you. When you receive your certificate, you provide it to your ISP so that they can bind the certificate to your domain on the web server. The certificate is issued and validated only for a specific length of time. So, you must renew your certificate periodically. Pricing does vary significantly by CA, but this can average $200 or so per year.
Since SSL is a world wide standard and works the same on all web servers and web browsers, a certificate issued from one vendor is no stronger or weaker than a certificate issued from any other vendor. So, you can choose almost any CA vendor that you want. However, the thing to be aware of when choosing a CA vendor is that not all browsers know whom all CA vendor's are. If a browser encounters an SSL certificate issued by a CA that it is not already familiar with by default, it will display a warning to your site's end user stating that it does not know who issued this certificate. The end user must then accept the warning from their browser before it will let them continue. Unfortunately, most end users do not understand what is happening when this occurs. Some will simply accept it and continue on and everything will work just fine for these users. Some may become alarmed because they don't understand what their browser is asking them, and they may not continue and because of that will not be able to use your SSL protected site. So, it is highly recommend sticking with a well-known CA vendor, in order to guarantee yourself the widest acceptance of your site by the most common browsers that end users might be utilizing. XCENT uses www.thawte.com as our Certificate Authority.
Installing and Configuring Your eCommerce Software
Once you have considered and decided on the above topics, you can begin preparing your eCommerce software for actual real world use. Getting most eCommerce software ready for use is just a matter of configuring the various options in the software. Most eCommerce applications have a variety of configuration options and settings and XCENT's applications are no exception. So, it's important to be sure to go through all of the setup and installation documentation completely. Don't try to rush through it. XCENT's web server applications are flexible in that if you begin using them before you enable various eCommerce options, they will adapt and operate just fine. So if you install an application before tuning on any billing features, and later turn on the billing feature after users have already been utilizing the site, the application will automatically adjust. For example it gathers billing data from end user accounts that were created previous to charging fees and other such options. This allows new sites a fast and easy way to get started simply and then grow into becoming a full on eCommerce site by starting out free and then adding in services and fees as the site grows.
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