codemonkey
Shared on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 11:45For those that don't know, I took a few days off from work to ramp up my wifes e-commerce website. Fifteen hours of PHP it seems, lots of coding going on.
Building a single web view, for instance, the checkout screen, can take hours. Advanced search screen? Probably five hours of perfecting before I got it right. It has to work on all browsers (yes, even those silly mac ones like Safari) and it has to be functional. What a pain in the ass.
Anyway, now on to the fun e-commerce "nickle and dime your ass" information - good for those that want to sell stuff on the Internet...
To sell stuff, using a credit card checkout, is not as easy as one would assume. You ever been to a site and all they offer is "PayPal" as a checkout method? There is a reason. To get credit card functionality one must enlist the work of a "Payment Gateway" and a get a "Merchant Account." So, we're going with the big merchant account place, known as Authorization.Net. They're pretty good, and everyone uses them.
So, to sign up for this, you're looking at $299.99. You also want to have a secure checkout right? You need a certificate for your security (digital certificate that is), which costs $299.00 for two years, or a bit cheaper with some of the other vendors (I think on the order of $99.99 per year or so). Now you're in the hole for roughly $400.00 bucks right?
WRONG. More... you have only paid setup fees for your merchant account. Now, you pay $20.00/mo for continued service (or $25.00 for a slightly better plan), and $10.00/mo for the payment gateway. So, that's $30.00 a month right?
WRONG.
Now you pay $0.10 per transaction (or, if you go with the $25.00 plan you get 100 transactions free). That covers your merchant account, but wait, there's more! $0.25 cents per transaction for the payment gateway. So, your paying roughly $0.35 to perform a transaction from your site. Now, granted, a transaction is ALL the products the customer is buying - not per item - but still. That's adding up if your margins are low.
All in all, $400.00 for the setup fees, another $100 or so per year to up-keep your certificate authentications (so shoppers can trust you), $30.00 a month to route credit card information, plus 0.35 cents a transaction.
Using paypal, its a percentage of the sale I believe, I don't know for sure (that's the wife's area).
Ok, now we've just got to sell tons of stuff to make-up the costs of ...selling tons of stuff... :-)
CodeMonkey
Building a single web view, for instance, the checkout screen, can take hours. Advanced search screen? Probably five hours of perfecting before I got it right. It has to work on all browsers (yes, even those silly mac ones like Safari) and it has to be functional. What a pain in the ass.
Anyway, now on to the fun e-commerce "nickle and dime your ass" information - good for those that want to sell stuff on the Internet...
To sell stuff, using a credit card checkout, is not as easy as one would assume. You ever been to a site and all they offer is "PayPal" as a checkout method? There is a reason. To get credit card functionality one must enlist the work of a "Payment Gateway" and a get a "Merchant Account." So, we're going with the big merchant account place, known as Authorization.Net. They're pretty good, and everyone uses them.
So, to sign up for this, you're looking at $299.99. You also want to have a secure checkout right? You need a certificate for your security (digital certificate that is), which costs $299.00 for two years, or a bit cheaper with some of the other vendors (I think on the order of $99.99 per year or so). Now you're in the hole for roughly $400.00 bucks right?
WRONG. More... you have only paid setup fees for your merchant account. Now, you pay $20.00/mo for continued service (or $25.00 for a slightly better plan), and $10.00/mo for the payment gateway. So, that's $30.00 a month right?
WRONG.
Now you pay $0.10 per transaction (or, if you go with the $25.00 plan you get 100 transactions free). That covers your merchant account, but wait, there's more! $0.25 cents per transaction for the payment gateway. So, your paying roughly $0.35 to perform a transaction from your site. Now, granted, a transaction is ALL the products the customer is buying - not per item - but still. That's adding up if your margins are low.
All in all, $400.00 for the setup fees, another $100 or so per year to up-keep your certificate authentications (so shoppers can trust you), $30.00 a month to route credit card information, plus 0.35 cents a transaction.
Using paypal, its a percentage of the sale I believe, I don't know for sure (that's the wife's area).
Ok, now we've just got to sell tons of stuff to make-up the costs of ...selling tons of stuff... :-)
CodeMonkey
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Comments
Submitted by DSmooth on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 11:48
Submitted by TANK on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 11:59
Submitted by BrokenDesign on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 12:00
Submitted by Dawnfades on Wed, 10/11/2006 - 13:53