Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>The book can be read from front to back, but each chapter is self contained so the reader can skip chapters to read those that they are interested in. Each chapter will move from basic to advanced where applicable and also relate what the administrator (reader) is doing to how this affects what the client sees on the site.</p> <p>So, for example, the customization chapter will start off with a discussion on the concept of design and how to relate this to your business. Once the reader has a clear idea of what they need to do, we look at some really simple changes such as modifying the site's language, before moving to some advanced modifications which may involve some PHP programming. At the same time the discussion will demonstrate how the changes made affect the site.</p> <p>Throughout the book, much consideration is given to the "right" way to doing things. Readers will have the great advantage that they begin, from the very start, doing things properly. This will save them a lot of time and effort in the years to come as they build on and modify their site. Utilizing best practices and sound methodologies is a great asset for beginners and experienced users alike.</p> <p>At all times, the coverage given in this book pays homage to the fact that, ultimately, the reader has a business goal in mind. To this end, the material never gets bogged down in technical issues or long discourses, but rather focuses on what is practically important for the online business and then moves on. To complement this, there are plenty of suggestions and hints as to how and where to look for further information.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Foreword
Introduction
Index

Summary


Having a comprehensive payment and shipment policy goes a long way to running a successful online business. After completing this chapter, you should now know exactly what you need to do in order to implement your own store's payment and shipping functionality. Hopefully, you will have decided to take as little risk as possible by handing over your customer's credit information to secure and trusted providers. I should reiterate the fact that you should only use trusted payment service providers—there are a lot of fraudsters out there.

So, by this stage you should have all your payment facilities up and running, with all the requisite accounts working as they should. Further, your calculations of the price of goods should include shipping options with the correct values for your target customers. But the job is not done yet. Recall that we are communicating with PayPal's IPN server without the use of encryption. Even worse, we have not secured any part of the site yet—it is wholly...