The only way I've found to get started learning something new about the Internet is to bare my soul to the world - find a forum on the subject, declare your Noob status and wear a raincoat for when they throw rotting vegetables, laugh, and spit at you. When they're bored with the vegetables the help actually starts rolling in (usually after another noob has come in so that I can throw fruit at him)
I am an old man (that means 35 to you) and have been creating web sites forever but have never brushed up against eCommerce. I need to dive in. I have very good HTML and CSS skills, very light backend knowledge.
I think I understand:
1) shopping carts are a front end that control/display/house inventory and pass payment info onto a Payment Gateway
2) Payment Gateways are what actually process the payment info and interact with (or sometimes are) a Bank.
Are the previous comments correct?
I have several sites hosted at HostMySite. I am planning to start my first one that incorporates eCommerce. I don't have a Merchant Account so I don't believe I can accept credit cards. I have a PayPal account but not a business account. I looked at their site tonight to see if I could maybe use their cart since I figured PayPal was the only form of payment I would be able to accept for now, but it really looks weak.
I've heard Miva is tough to customize but I looked through this forum and some of the links pointed me to places that offer help. OpenUI looks like it would be helpful to an extent. My problem is that I'm pretty anal about being able to have the store look like the rest of my site - a pretty common request. So anyway I think I will use Miva. but what else do I need to know? Does anyone have links that kinda dispell the mysteries of eCommerce? Like a link that can make it easier for me to understand what I need to know, what I can do to accpet payment and what forms of payment I can accept.
OK, I've rambled on enough for now. Hopefully there aren't too many people smacking their foreheads...
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