Hosted web based shopping carts offer secure-socket protected pages for collecting on-line payment information.

If you already have a standard merchant cc account, some carts can be run in manual mode for fees that run under $600 a year.

In manual, the cart collects the order and credit information, sends you a notification e-mail, and sends your customer an e-mail order acknowledgement. You retrieve the order, run the credit slip through your usual business merchant account, and mail the merchandise. Even in this basic mode, many carts offer reports on your sales and include the ability to "broadcast" html e-mail to your customer database.

For a slightly larger fee, you can get a package with a streamlined online merchant gateway application, and real-time processing. The merchant gateway application is a one time cost and cc fees are charged on sales processed in real-time.

Some carts provide mechanisms for product variables and bundles. Product variables allow you to offer choices that don't affect price, (i.e. color selection, or size). Bundles let you group similar items with different prices, (such as adult, senior, and youth tickets), so that all tickets for a specific date can be listed from a single listing.

The low initial cost of "do it yourself" javascript carts programs may be attractive to shoestring budgets, but sites that use them invite security risks. We do not install do it yourself carts. Servers that service credit data should be behind a firewall, and offer around the clock monitoring, intruder detection, data validation, and other security measures.

PayPal and Acteva are alternative ways to provide online sales. PayPal requires merchant sign-up, and PayPal buyer registration. Unfortunately, process required to get a non-pay pal customer to register and return to your site to confirm their purchase has a tendency to kill the impulse to buy. The service doesn't include html email broadcasts. Costs range from 1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 USD† per transaction ( 2008 rates). Their pro package includes some perks, but costs $30/ month in addition to transaction fees. Paypal has a current push to offer other services, so perhaps it will evolve into something that rivals the cart software.

Acteva sales are less awkward, but are not inexpensive. Fees run from a low of $1.50 + 04.5% for items priced $15 to $100, to $16.50 + 02.0% for items over $500. Items under $15 are a flat $1.50/transaction. Fees for accepting credit cards are 2.5% -3% and charged separately, (deducted prior to sending payment to the Organizer). Acteva has professional style ticketing mechanisms to print and mail tickets, and offers bar code equipment rental. However they seem to be set up for events that run relatively infrequently. They are developing a way to assign people to "tables" which points to uses for dinners and fundraising events.

If you sell items other than event tickets, or you sell large numbers of tickets for an extended season, you may find a shopping cart less expensive than Acteva or Paypal. Music sales, and digital items require specialized delivery systems, and require different sales arrangements.

If you are interested in adding ecommerce to your web site, please contact us at webdesign@jbelldesigns.com with details of your business, your products, and projected volume.