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Our hosting plans allow you to create your own e-commerce site to sell your products and services online. To make your website an e-commerce site, you just need to add a product or service descriptions and a shopping cart!
If you intend to process credit cards on your site, which you probably do, we recommend that you configure an SSL certificate for your domain and apply it to your website. You have to have an SSL certificate to make sure the transactions on your site are secure.
Cart Options
There are quite a few shopping cart options available, and you can even set up one yourself from within your cPanel dashboard with the Softaculous installer. Some of the more popular shopping carts offered in cPanel are:
Navigate to Softaculous within cPanel to install a shopping cart, or a variety of other apps and useful widgets for your site.
Note: if you don't have Softaculous already within your cPanel dashboard, hit us up! We'll add it.
Other Must Haves
A fully functioning store will also require you to have a payment gateway and/or a merchant account (to process credit card transactions), and an SSL certificate (to secure the information being processed).
Merchant Account
Your merchant account is what allows you to accept payments. The merchant account is set up between you and a merchant provider, and does not have anything to do with us. Your store software connects through our server, to the merchant provider's server and sends it the credit card details your customer just typed into the store software's customer interface. The merchant provider then charges the customer's card, and moves the funds into your account with them. You can do this with PayPal, some credit card companies and other similar institutions.
How you get paid by the merchant provider varies from provider to provider, but normally they will either deposit into your account directly, send you a check, or send you a PayPal payment. The credit card information, when in transit between your customer's computer and your server must be encrypted for safety reasons. This is why you need an SSL certificate!
SSL Certificate
The SSL certificate can be thought of as a lockbox for your data; while it doesn't make it any harder for anyone to get a hold of the data, it encrypts it to the point that nobody can understand it. In addition to encrypting data, the SSL shows visitors that your business is legitimate, and will not attempt to defraud them in any way.
If you've got all the pieces as laid out above, your cart, merchant account and SSL certificate, you should be ready to rock!
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