Podcast 55: Ecommerce 101
Posted in Podcast on: Monday, October 23, 2006 by Paul Boag
Payment gateways, secure transitions, order fulfilment. Ecommerce can be a confusing subject. In this week’s show we are joined by Eric and Ben from the eBiz Vodcast and together we endeavour to explain all you need to know in order to get started in ecommerce.
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With Ben and Eric being almost as talkative as myself and Marcus, I am not even going to try to document all that we covered. The main topic for this week’s show was basically an introduction to setting up of an ecommerce site. We looked at some of the more confusing aspects such as payment gateways, fulfilment and credit card transactions. However, we also reviewed shopping cart software and discussed the top 10 things that make or break an online shop.
To learn more about ecommerce I highly recommend you subscribe to the EBiz Vodcast. Ben and Eric are excellent presenters that are both informative and entertaining. If you enjoy Boagworld you will love their show.
Also in this week’s show
We discuss the acquisition of YouTube by Google. We also cover the launch of IE7, which is impressive has it hadn’t been released when we recorded the show. And finally we discuss the web development survey released by SitePoint.
8 Comments
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Just to let people know Mozilla have annouced Firefox 2 will be released tomorrow.
You discuss the Google you tube news and well Google made over 2 billion profit as soon as they got it! They done this by the shares and stocks going up to over 4 billion! Thought i would mention that but great podcast once again!
Good show.
I’m working on an eCommerce site for a friend and found the comments and insight by the “pros” to be very interesting.
I hope you keep these kinds of interviews on the “shed – jewel”… ;-)
In this episode the guests made mention of using Paypal with your ecommerce system but they made a mistake as far as I can tell.
They said that for people to pay for stuff they’re going to buy from any website where the transactions are handled by Paypal that the buyer has to have a Paypal account.
That is false. We set up an ecommerce site for a client earlier this year and used Paypal to handle the transactions as the payment gateway.
Anyone can buy items from the website using their credit card and they do not have to have a PayPal account to do so.
If you have a PayPal account you can use it to pay, but you can also use a credit card and never have to sign-up for nor have a PayPal account to complete your purchase.
Dunno if they were mistaken or misunderstood or if they were just guessing, but they are wrong and I just wanted to point it out. Not to make them look bad, but just to let other web designers know the correct information since using PayPal is an easy and inexpensive way to integrate the necessary payment gateway step into your ecommerce system.
@Ben Tupper -
The segment of the show you are referring to was comparing using a payment gateway vs. using straight PayPal Payments (no gateway used). This may not have been made crystal clear – what can I say, it was a conversation, not a presentation.
You are correct, PayPal has three separate merchant gateway products that behave just like any other gateway – pay with credit card – no PayPal account necessary. They are Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro and the PayFlow Gateway (recently purchased from VeriSign).
Cool… glad you followed up! Thanks for making the post and clarifying.
As I stated, I wasn’t trying to dog you out, but just wanted to let other designer/developers know what I had found in my own experience setting up my first e-commerce package for a client’s site.
Thanks for the info. I enjoyed your interview on the Boagworld show!
No worries, Ben – I totally understand. Merchant accounts are one area where many people become confused. PayPal Website Payments services are pretty popular now mostly because of the flat rate fee structure. Many businesses are tired of being fee’d at every turn.
PayPal’s 3 new services are getting more support from shopping cart software vendors, so getting started is easier than ever… pretty soon between google checkout and paypal you wont’ need a merchant account.