lady bugg wrote:...but would prefer a smooth running "virtual terminal" opposed to...
You'll want to compare rates on handheld units vs. virtual units on the web. When I looked at this 10 years ago, it was cheaper to get the handheld. But I don't know now.
So, if you get a virtual or handheld unit, you'll have to:
- Build your own product catalog, or find a sitescript (Google that), or find a F/OSS product like OSCommerce, ZenCart, etc., or hire someone to do it custom.
- Build your own shopping cart or find someone or some product or some free tool to do that for you.
- Purchase a Verisign SSL certificate for your website and have your web hosting provider hook it up. Then, all links to a page where you collect credit card information need to have https:// in them, and all links from that area into any other area of your website need to have http:// in them. Nobody likes typing in credit card info on a page that has http:// in the URL and doens't have that lock icon appear (either in the address bar or status bar, depending on browser).
- Have your orders file into a table on your website, and make certain that this table is super secure, including requiring you to login to it, that no one can just cut and paste that bookmark and access the main page if they haven't logged in, and that you use https:// to interact with that page.
- Have a system on your site that handles checking off order statuses including payment pending, shipping pending, refund pending, and so on, and that it automatically informs the customer or gives them some page on your site where they can see this status. If it needs to automatically interact with you or the end user by email, then you'll need to hook that up.
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And when you look at all that versus, say, purchasing a Yahoo Stores account and selling through that -- you might do better just to get a Yahoo Stores account.