We are currently looking at setting up an "online shop" at work, selling products and items relating to our line of business. We are a small firm of cabinet makers and wish to sell items of furniture and cabinet making tools and related products to both the trade and DIY over the net, with payments made by credit card.

As I know little about IT, can anyone offer any advice as to the best route to take to set something up?

We have looked at e-commerce systems for DIY site building (notably streamline.worldpay.com), or may look into employing a web designer to produce a site. Has anyone had any experience in either field, or can someone recommend a good DIY system?

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

Cheers,

Olly.

Dream Weaver is your man :)

Heres his new site Kreature Design

The Worldpay route could be the way to go initially, but check out the costs - eats into your profit quite badly.

It's extremely expensive to set up your own credit card processing. There are so many things to worry about, mainly security.

The cheapest way would be to start with just an online catalogue with telephone sales. If volumes pick up, then consider creating the online shop.

Just my 2p's worth.

Olly - I've just this evening finished just that - an online shop with secure CC facilites -selling Subaru performance parts - www.scoobyworld.co.uk

Mail me offline if you want some help or pointers.

Neil

www.scoobyworld.co.uk

Neil, good effort but hardly an online "shop" - just a form to pass values through.

People always cane worldpay for the charges they take and say "oh my mate works in the ecommerce sector of barclays, I can get you a rate as low as 1.5% blah blah". Well in fairness I know of many companies who have been offered a daft rate by the bank "ooh the risk, the risk they say) and since worldpay do both the online auth and the merchant service its bloody good. In summary, worldpay has enabled a number of companies to take credit cards that would not have done otherwise.

My company is a Worldpay partner (is that why I'm sticking up for them ;) ) so I have access to all the technical documentation. You can integrate using simple forms, COM objects, java servlets, its a very good service.

Anyway, back to the question..I'm in a reasonably good place to offer advice since I have looked at a lot of off-the-shelf packages and eventaully I wrote the SIDC shop from scratch. Why ? Because no matter how good they claim the packages are they look basic and samey ("an actinic site always looks like an actinic site"). However unless you are a programmer building your own site could be costly.

Have a chat to Simon (Kreature) and myself. I'm happy to give out the shop code I wrote (the MLR are using it now!) so we might be able to get you a good looking inexpensive solution.

This month's PC Pro covers setting up on-line shops.

Probably worth a read.