Purchasing on a website - how ?

Dolby

Dolby

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Probably not the most ideal place to post this, but I'm hoping someone in the thread can actually assist.

If I wanted to create an e-commerce site - what would I need on the finance side of things?

I visited a site the other day and when it came to payment, it linked me to another site to handle the payment, and then back to the original site.

Is that Verisign or Thawte?
 
You need to get a domain name, like www.yourcompany.co.za, where .co.za domain names costs R50 per year.
Then you need to get a webserver for the actual file/web content hosting, which is much cheaper overseas. I'm not sure what this would typically cost you, but I would say that you should be able to get reasonably far with US$100 per year. One absolute MUST HAVE with selecting of a web host, would be that it must have HTTPS support with certificates signed by a known CA like VeriSign/Thawte.

OpenWeb made use of http://www.vcs.co.za/ for the payments.
The PC shops where I buy from just accept EFT's directly to their bank accounts. If it would be a problem for you that you will not immediately know that the payment went through, then you can always just get an account at all the 5 different banks in SA, which is what Wootware.co.za did AFAIK.
Another alternative would be to make use of Paypal.

VeriSign/Thawte are certificate authorities and I doubt that they are involved in the payment transactions itself.
There is something called 3-D Secure, which was developed by Visa.
 
I would have posted this in the webdesign area.... but oh well.

If you already have a ecommerce site, with a domain (R50/yr) and a webhost(<R50/month), all you are going to need is a payment gateway(Monthly charges + per transaction charges). There are quite a few. VCS (we use them at work), mygate, paygate, safeshop, netcash etcetc. You then link the two up (takes a few hours at most, depending on your ecommerce solution) and bobs your uncle. Quick, easy, cheap(ish).
 
Dolby said:
I visited a site the other day and when it came to payment, it linked me to another site to handle the payment, and then back to the original site.
Click to expand...

While it is always ideal to have SSL available for all client information, some merchants use their third party payment processor for this. E - Commerce web sites generally have a low barrier of entry with the most expensive cost being stock in most cases. The design and any development usually presents most of the technical cost.

There are also payment processors such as PayFast www.payfast.co.za that charge per transaction instead of per month.
 
I have heard very good things about MyGate, but haven't worked with them. VCS was super easy to work with - they look at the variables you post to them and program your gateway around that rather than insist that you post to them in a specific format.

Before you get any payment gateway, you will need to open a merchant account with a bank, for the money to be deposited into. I spent weeks getting stuffed around by variouse banks and bank managers but eventually found Standard Bank to be the easiest and most reasonable.

The biggest expense in running an e-com site is the one that most people forget about... marketing! Whether it's SEO, PPC, meedja buys, email blasts, offline campaigns, whatever...you need to spend some money to get people to see your site. No visitors=No sales=Site fail.
 
Thanks for the info!

VCS looks like it would be suite my needs - easy and relativly inexpensive. I'll contact them and make arrangements.

Standard Bank is also the cheapest to open a merchant account - so think I'll do some research into that.

So I suppose after design and implementation, you'd be looking at R600.00pm to run the site through hosting, domain, VCS and a merchant account.

What about legalities and registering?
VAT numbers, CCs or PTY's?

I'd try this for 6-12 months and if it works, it would simply be small, passive income on the the side generating very littel - so surely no need?
 
It all depends on your traffic - if you are only handling a very small volume then a cheap shared hosting account will suffice (you can get these for less than R50 per month... I like hostgator.com)

Domain is R50 per year for a .co.za (get from www.co.za). International TLDs such as .com and .net are around $5 - $10 per year depending on who you use and wha tspecials are available (I like namecheap.com).

If I remember correctly, VCS does have a minimum monthly charge, so even if you do zero sales there is still a minimum monthly cost involved (can't remember exactly but I think it was around R600 or so)
What about legalities and registering?
VAT numbers, CCs or PTY's?
Click to expand...
I'm not a laywer, but it's pretty much the same as setting up any small business - you will probably need to register at least a CC to get a merchant account - they won't give you one as an individual of a sole trader (at least they didn't last time I checked).

If you're just looking for a small residual income on the side, rather go with affiliate marketing or simple AdSense sites. I make R3000 - R4000 extra beer money per month from Google and there is NO work and hardly any cost involved. Feel free to ask if you want more info
 
Thanks flock.

How does one determine traffic needs upfront?

Yea - I only want the beer money for now with little work ;) I'll check out adsense ...

Thanks!
 
Dolby said:
How does one determine traffic needs upfront?
Click to expand...

Easy question complex answer. It all depends on your profit margins and conversion rates. You want to make R100 per day and you are making R50 per sale you will need to make 2 sales per day.

If you have a conversion rate or 0.5%, tha tmeans you will need 400 visitors per day. Increase conversion rate to 2% and you will only need 100 visitors per day - how to do this is way out of the scope of a simple forum post.

Same with AdSense - if your click through rates (conversion for adsense sites) is 1% and your average earning per click is 50c, that means you are making 50c per 100 views. In order to make R100 per day will take around 10 000 page views.

I've had a lot of friends asking me about all this stuff lately and I'm doing a series of video blog posts on how to do it all for the (very rough and unprofessional, it's the same stuff I've paid $thousands to learn from variouse online marketing gurus, but because this is primarily for my friends I'm not charging anything) - if it's OK with the mods I'll post a link here when it's done (I guess 4 or 5 more days)

Either way - just go get this -->http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/keyresearch-info
- it's the MOST powerful online marketing tool I have ever seen! It will cost about R1000 in our money but if you can't make it pay for itelf in a month or 2 your just too stupid to be online! I kid you not - it is that awesome and the help videos are very in depth and make a pretty decent online marketing tutorial by themselves (but they are kinda longwinded and boring, presented by a guy that fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down - you can't win them all)
 
Thanks for the info :)

I'll research a litte more on Adsense and traffic!
 
Flock of Rabid Sheep said:
If you're just looking for a small residual income on the side, rather go with affiliate marketing or simple AdSense sites. I make R3000 - R4000 extra beer money per month from Google and there is NO work and hardly any cost involved. Feel free to ask if you want more info
Click to expand...

atm im messing around with google blogs+ adsense. Im trying to figure out how i would get traffic to my site, seo? keywords?
I've also seen similar programs to market samurai, but do these really work or is it all trial and error?
Lastly, is it better to focus on one website or more than one website?
 
You can use the arbitrage method and by cheap traffic from places like bidvertiser or adbrite and direct visitors to pages with high paying AdSense, but this isn't really for noobs are you would probably lose your shirt before you made a buck.

The best way is with simple SEO on long tail keywords. .. Simply put... find keywords that are getting at least 100 searches per day and have fewer than 20 000 competing sites. Then analyse the strength of the competition - if Wikipedia and Youtube are ahead of you, just forget it! Check the maximum Adwords pay per click and select the terms that are liable to earn the highest cost per click.

This can be pretty complex and take ages, but it is the most vital step of the process. MS does it all within seconds and a LOT more.. finds content for your site, finds affiliate products, creates ads, uploads them to your site, finds link partners etc etc. You say you looked at programs similair to MS, but nothing even comes close (I know - I've probably bought them all!). Don't hesitate or think twice about this one - just go get MS (even if you just get the trial version to start) --> http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/keyresearch-info - if it sucks or you can't make it pay for itself, feel free to come back and flame the hell out of me.


Create sites around these keywords and terms. Simple WordPress or Joomla sites are good enough. Do one at a time until each site is making at least R10 per day before moving onto the next one.
 
Out of interest :

http://www.avshop.co.za/

Why would bidorbuy cost R250,000.00 and a normal selling site like above cost like 5% of that? :/
The bank end? Or do I have my 5% price screwed up?
 
5% of the R250,000 for BOB ... So R12,500 for a noraml, small website?

Sorry - was phrased oddly ;)
 
Oh - sorry ... other threads

I aked how much a site like BOB would take cost to create. The answers seemed to indicate R250,000.00+ if starting from the ground up.

Is that how much normal e-commerse sites cost?
Or is it because it's a huge site?
Or does the auction vs selling have something to do with it?

I'm guessing that www.avshop.co.za would cost a fraction to setup?
 
Mind pointing me to a few of these threads?

Any company will probably end up costing you that much. The site itself would probably not cost you more than R30000? It is the other things like insurance (N/A here), advertising, personnel, telephone systems, lawyers yadayada that can end up costing you a pretty penny.
You could eg. set up avshop overnight if you want. You got a doman, got hosting, download a free template... bobs your uncle!
 
You want a sideline thingy generating some sideline money. You don't "need" a R250 000 site.

I can get you a fully functional ecommerce site, using free tools, within hours. Domain registration, website hosting, free ecommerce software, free template... The problem with this is that it will not feel like your website at all. You will only be able to get your own feel and flow of the site, as you want it, if you lay down some serious shiny ones. I can think that BOB cost R250k back in the day as a lot of the things used there were brand new and a whole lot of R300ish-per-hour changes had to be done to the initial version of the site to shape it into what it is today. Don't expect a free ecommerce solution and template to fit your needs outright.

If you seriously want to process CCs without too much banking hassle, get a FNB/Paypal account... but then you'll sit with some exchange rate risk and extra fees that you'll need to cover. Rather contact standard bank and ask them how much they charge per month for their merchant accounts (or whatever they call them).

Edit: Dude, just go the EFT route so long.
 
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