|  Selling Your Wares
on the Web
By Sean TimberlakeIntroduction: You can use the Web to sell products, regardless of whether you're running a mom-and-pop operation or a major chain. Low-tech:
You can sell stuff on the Web with nothing more than an address, fax or phone number.Auctions: Got a lot of little things? Check out online auctions.
The easiest way: If you want to take credit card orders, you no longer need a merchant account.
Online storefront providers such as Yahoo Store and iCat provide an inexpensive way to sell securely and economically.Secure transactions
are important to customer retention.Alternatives like E-cash and Echarge circumvent the worries of credit card fraud, but are not established enough to serve as a replacement.
How Fusion does it.Conclusion:
If you want to build your own storefront, make sure you have all your ducks in a row: secure server, merchant account, payment remittance service.Resources on the webDrop the term "e-commerce" at a cocktail party and watch the eyebrows arch. Sure, everyone's on the Net these days, but still somehow the mention of online sales evokes images of snake oil salespeople and shell game shysters. But you can use the Web to sell products, regardless of whether you're running a mom-and-pop operation or a major chain. The numbers are enticing: 20 million shoppers online now, an estimated $400 billion in online sales by 2002, including $25 billion for small businesses by 2000. Who wouldn't want a piece of that pie?So Where Do I Begin? If you don't already have a site, consider
SiteMatic. You can build your site, and a complete e-commerce catalog, all online. No software required.The term e-commerce sounds intimidating (how about e-tailing?). Do you need to know how to build Web pages?
Does this require fancy, expensive hardware and software? Can you afford to make money on the Web? On its most basic level, e-commerce simply means promoting products or services through an online medium. So, for example, you could create one Web page with one product pictured on it, offering nothing more than pricing information and an address, fax or phone number—information you should probably provide anyway as a measure of customer service. Someone orders and sends
you a check; you cash it and send the product out. Guess what? You've just successfully completed an e-commerce transaction. Or, if you are already a retailer, and are using a credit card POS terminal ("Point of Sale" you know, those credit card swipey things), you can even start taking credit card payments for your on-line orders—simply punch in the numbers. These are obviously simplistic examples, but they illustrate how e-commerce does not have to be scary or complicated.
And in both cases, your only expenses were your ISP, your POS terminal fees (if you have one) and the cost of packaging materials and shipping (which can be almost "zero" if you're selling items you can distribute on the Web). Going, Going, Gone If you have a collection of individual products, such as collectibles, maintaining your own site can be labor-intensive. You'd have to manually change the site, remove pages of
products that have been sold, constantly post new ones as items come in, and so on. Try your hand at an online auction. eBay is the best-known example right now. When you post a product for sale on eBay, users can post bids, and the highest bidder wins when
the auction is over, usually a week later. You contact the winner directly, get the payment and ship the product. You can even set a minimum amount for which you would be willing to sell your goods.Consider Amazon zShops--an inexpensive way to sell items online. There are pro's and con's, but it's fast, easy, and if nothing else, it can be great, inexpensive marketing.
Or you can try on-line classifieds. Infobeat's classifieds 2000 service lets you post free ads that people around the world can search for. The service also notifies potential buyers via e-mail when you post an item they're looking for.
Both these services require that you figure out how to get that item to the customer, and how to receive payment (traditional mail and checks are low-tech, but they work). But hey—the services are free (or inexpensive) and they get your product and a buyer together—and that's the point. If you're a charity, look at http://www.givetocharity.com
—this service has secure servers to take donations and forward them to you.Setting Up Shop If you want to move any significant amount of product through your online storefront, you're probably going to want something a little more automated. Punching all those credit card numbers in could give you a nasty case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. - If you want the least expensive and easiest way
to accept orders and credit cards, without having to have a credit card merchant account, take a look at
ccnow.com.
This service combines shopping cart services, with the
ability to accept credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover).
The company sends you, the merchant, a check, twice a month. The cost for all of this is 9.5% of each sale. There is no paperwork, no setup fee, and no monthly fee.If you're going to be selling a lot of products and need the lowest possible fees, you'll want a merchant account with a bank to process credit cards. Many major banks can provide you with an account, and prices vary depending on the type and volume of products you are selling.If you already have a merchant account and just want a secure way to take orders, look at www.jumbomall.com. This site offers free shopping cart and secure order taking facilities. When someone places an order, you're sent an e-mail. Then you visit their secure site to pick up the order information, and process the credit card using your merchant account. The low-end service is free. If you want more
advanced features and the ability to customize your store or manage multiple items using database files, it costs $30 a month.A similar service is iCat, whose monthly fees vary from $49.95 to $349.95, depending on the number of products
you are selling. If you are selling fewer than 10, though, it's completely free!On the higher end, there´s been a tidal wave of services to get your storefront up on the Web quickly, easily and economically. For example, Yahoo Store hosts your store and takes the orders, running you anywhere from $100 to $300/month.In both cases, you can create your storefront and you then retrieve your orders and send them through your merchant account for processing. Furthermore, these services provide
completely secure transactions. Speaking of Security... This is probably the number one reason people are wary about buying things on the Net. Broadcasting your credit
card number through the ether? Sounds pretty dicey. But, in many ways, you are far more secure buying on the Internet than you are in a physical store.Generally speaking, when you open a secure connection to an e-commerce site, you are using what's called Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. What this means is that whatever information you send is encrypted, or garbled in a specific way that can be interpreted on the other side. The secure server then keeps that information encrypted so no one can get access to your private information. In some cases, retailers and banks even transfer that information to a server that is not connected to the Net at all.
An important note here is that e-mail servers are generally not secure, so you probably do not want to take credit card orders by e-mail. If you are not using a secure server to collect sensitive or personal information, you must announce that beforehand to the customer. Hackers use programs that "sniff" out information, often using pattern-matching to find obvious patterns such as credit card and Social Security numbers. But if your credit
card is encrypted, it looks like a very long string of letters and numbers instead, so the sniffer cannot find it. By contrast, when you purchase something at a physical store, there's a paper trail left behind, containing your number in its entirety. If it falls into the wrong hands, and it can do so all too easily, then some sneak can run off and have fun at your expense—literally. There oughta be another way
Believe it or not, you can take orders over the Web without using credit cards. One example is to set up an e-cash account. E-cash allows users to pass virtual money from point to point, even from person to person, anonymously.
There's no credit card number to steal, no check to get lost in the mail. It's the closest thing to actual cash on the Web. Another method is Echarge, which charges purchases to the customer's phone bill instead of his or her credit card.The down side with these and other alternative methods is
that they require special accounts and software for the retailer and the customer, and they are not very widespread. They would do best as secondary methods of payment, not in lieu of credit. In Fusion Why, even NetObjects Fusion has some handy-dandy e-commerce features. NetObjects Fusion 4.0 and NetObjects Fusion Components, give you access to a full range of e-commerce solutions through an easy-to-use, end-to-end site-building product.
Use the included component for iCat Commerce Online, and build complete catalog and shopping-cart functionality in your NetObjects Fusion Web site. More turnkey e-commerce solutions will be supported in the near future. The included component for IBM HotMedia lets you enhance the online shopping experience by adding audio and visual effects. Or you can incorporate the e-commerce application of your choice via components for Allaire Cold Fusion, Lotus
Domino, or Microsoft Active Server Pages application servers. Is That All There Is? Of course, this is just scratching the surface of e-commerce. There are myriad ways to build a commerce site from scratch, if that's what you want. Just remember that if you plan to run your own storefront
on the Web, you need more than just your merchant account. You must work with your ISP to establish SSL connections, which will almost always cost more than your standard fees. You also will want to get a payment remittance service such as CheckFree on board to transmit the credit card
information directly to your bank. If you are already retailing and have a POS terminal, your bank may have package deals available to make this easier (take, for example, Wells Fargo Bank's arrangements with a variety of POS provider and remittance agencies).
Web Resources: 
About the Author  Sean Timberlake is the Lead Producer for the Computing & Internet topic on the Snap search engine, a joint venture between NBC and CNET. He has written numerous reviews and features both forCNET and for Snap. Left-side nav bars are his penultimate pet peeve.
Illustration: Global Enterprise from www.artville.com "technology" by Robin Jareaux
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