Electronic Commerce - A Quick Overview

E-Commerce on the internet may be accomplished in many different ways. It can be as simple as an order form which your customers print out and fax to you. It can be as complex as a shopping cart system, which allows the consumer to select among many different products, calculates taxes, shipping and handling and processes credit cards in real time. It can also be anywhere between these two. The one thing which any of the e-commerce solutions does for your web site is turn it into a global storefront, providing the possibilities of gaining new customers and additional sales.

 

In order to accomplish this you need to bring together several important parts.

• Securing Electronic Transactions
• Point of Sale or Catalog Software
• Transmitting the Order
• Credit Card Processing

The following information highlights each of the above areas and shows how they can be combined as a complete solution which will simplify the handling Electronic Commerce on your web site. This complete solution handles Secure Transactions, Point of Sale, Transmitting your order and Credit Card Processing

Securing Electronic Transactions

To prevent others from watching transactions taking place on the Internet a layer of encryption is placed  between the server and the web browser. This is done using public key algorithms introduced by Netscape in a protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer Protocol). In addition to encryption, browsers need to verify that the web site they are connected to is who they say they are. This is done by using a Digital Certificate. An inexpensive server certificates can be obtained from any of the following vendors (Prices current as of 23 January, 2001 are subject to change): 

    Geotrust $119/year
    Thawte: $125/year 

    Verisign: $349/year

We charge a nominal one time fee of $50 to install the certificate on your server.
The following link provides a form which should be used to order a CSR for your digital certificates.

• Ordering you own Digital Certificate

Once you have SSL in place you can then access your secure site by specifying https: instead of http:    
     http://www.yoursitename.com  
or 

     http://www.yoursitename.com (depending on how your certificate was ordered) 
instead of

     http://www.yoursitename.com.

To securely send the contents of an order form to a cgi-script you would use something similar to

<form method="POST" action="https://www.yoursitename.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi">

Note: Once you are in secure mode make sure you do not refer to any elements like images that are outside of your secure site. 
e.g. http://www.yoursitename.com/images/logo.gif

Point of Sale or Catalog Software

Once you have secured your link between your customer and your site you need to present the customer with an easy way to order product. It can be as simple as the one page order form we use or as complicated as a catalog based order entry system. We are in the process of compiling a list of compatible shopping carts and should have a link to it here soon.

Getting your order

Also part of the Point of Sale process is your getting information about the order to you. This can be done by saving order information in a text or html file on your server, saving the information in a database or by sending secure e-mail to yourself. In order to facilitate this we provide GNU Privacy Guard and pgpformmail.pl on all of our Hosting Packages. GNU Privacy Guard requires that you have a copy of PGP or GNU Privacy Guard on your local machine to decrypt email encrypted with it.

Credit Card Processing

There are several ways of processing credit card payments. If you decide to process them yourself you will need a commercial business checking account and a merchant account. A merchant account allows you to accept credit cards and deposit them into your checking account.

 

If you don't have a merchant account you can get one through your local or national bank.

 

Once you have a merchant account you need to have some way of processing your credit cards on-line or off line. Your merchant account provider will need to provide you with a list of processors which will work with their merchant accounts. If you are using a shopping cart you need to make sure your shopping card will work with the processing gateway you have chosen, before you spend money on sign-up fees.