Friday, February 27, 2009

Web Hosting, How to Use Templates for E-Commerce

By Ricardo d Argence

Creating a professional-looking web site can be a difficult task. Really a complex animal is E-commerce web design. Many web hosting companies are offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates to cut the development time.

The hosting company you choose usually provides various types of templates from one-dimensional websites to more complicated functional websites. While professionally designed e-commerce websites can cost upwards of a few hundred and perhaps even thousands of dollars, simple templates can be much cheaper and may cost below $30.

Using a web template is much cheaper than paying a web designer $40 to $120 per hour to design a custom-made e-commerce website.

Other than the requirements of most web hosting programs, Web hosting templates that are designed for e-commerce have to have a shopping cart, and it most support an online catalog as well as payment processing. Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping, searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The types of e-commerce templates you will find are stand-alone and don't come with or use a particular shopping cart. It's up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

An e-commerce turnkey operation is a different option to e-commerce web hosting templates. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Web hosting plans have varying fee structure. The price of the hosting plan is based on the number of transactions.

If you want to compare functionality, you need to ask a lot of different questions: 1) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site; 2) whether there's a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you'll need to ask questions about: 1) how much it charges for each transaction; 2) is there's a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes; 4) what's the basic monthly fee for transactions.

It is important to speak with the hosting service that you use regarding e-commerce issues and the best options that are available to you. - 16039

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