EXTIMA Web Design: E-Commerce Solutions to Fit Your Business Needs

E-Commerce to Fit Your Business Needs.

E-Commerce Necessities

Extima designers will walk you through your individual needs to help choose the solution right for you. The four items you will need to get started in E-Commerce are:

1) A Shopping Cart - When selling multiple products, a shopping cart will keep the user's selections together so that they can simply check out when finished shopping. If you only have a few or just one product, the shopping cart can be forgone.

2) A Merchant Account - This is a bank account that can process the credit cards your customers use to purchase your product. Most large banks will help you open a merchant account with them.

3) Payment Gateway - A gateway provides Online Instant Verification of credit cards to help prevent credit card fraud.

4) Security Certificate - The information transferred must be encrypted before it is sent across the Internet so that credit card numbers and personal information cannot be collected by hackers. This certificate is proof that the information is in fact encrypted. Note: you can tell if your information is being transferred on a secure server by looking for a yellow lock icon in the bottom right corner of your web browser. This page is not encrypted, so there is no yellow lock.

Basic Pricing

Shopping Cart prices vary. Some people do not even need one because they sell only a few products or because they only sell one item of a set of products. If you are not sure, a designer will help you figure out what you need. Basic carts can start at about $199 to set up and $99 per year. Other more robust carts can be added into your hosting fees. Hosting with a shopping cart will cost about $60 per month.

Merchant Accounts will be set up through your bank. They are usually free to set up and will charge you a small percentage of each sale (a per transaction fee).

Payment Gateways will vary as to your needs. We can discuss the different options and determine which will be the least expensive for you. They will usually charge you a $100 to $300 set up fee. After that there will be a $10 to $50 monthly service fee and a flat rate per transaction fee of $.15 to $.40.

Finally the Security Certificate will be $125 to set up and $100 per year. If you opt for the Shopping Cart included with hosting, your Security Certificate will also be included.

Additional Features

With the surge in popularity of E-Commerce, people often need their Shopping Carts to perform additional functions. Some of those are the ability to download info into Quickbooks^® and perform customer tracking. We can discuss these options and others directly by phone. Feel free to e-mail us at or call 310.379.0936.