Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

Using an easy-to-read and engaging style, this book introduces the fundamentals of osCommerce, and helps you build your first online store. It covers the out-of-the-box features of osCommerce, but it also shows you how to customize the application to your own needs. The book starts with the basics of downloading and installing osCommerce, or simply how to enable it on your Internet domain using the tools provided by your host. All of the most important configuration issues are explained, with clear instructions and advice to help you make the right choices. Once osCommerce is installed and configured, you will take a good look at how to work with your store's data including product information as well as other data which is responsible for keeping your site healthy. The all important topic of customization is also dealt with comprehensively. You will see how to develop attractive sites that will make your store a pleasure to browse and your products a pleasure to buy! Of course, no discussion on osCommerce would be complete without a look at how to obtain and treat payments. Using the modules provided with osCommerce you will be collecting money from your happy customers in no time! Once the reader has a fully fledged, and operational site it is time to look at deployment? an important topic for discussion if development has taken place on a development machine. The appendix will add a few tools to your armory and shed some light as to what is going on behind the scenes in case things go awry.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 6. Taxes, Payments, and Shipping

Having reached this section of the development phase of your online store, you are permitted now to rub your hands together in a greedy fashion. Fundamentally, we all need to ensure a stable, if not always hugely profitable, source of income from our endeavors if we are to be able to realize our goals. Providing an excellent online avenue for sales, which makes it easy for customers to purchase goods from the comfort of their own homes, and which gives you, the merchant, the mouth-watering opportunity to sell to customers anywhere and any time is what e-commerce is all about.

To this end, osCommerce comes with a host of installable modules, which handle the complexities inherent in securing a variety of different payment types. As you would expect from software such as osCommerce, much thought and knowledge has gone into making the payment side of things as easy and efficient as possible. Try to imagine how much work would be involved in obtaining...