See Also   Introduction   Selecting a location   Laying the foundations   Designing the store   Receiving orders   Getting Paid   Keeping it secure   Promoting your store   Links   FAQ

Perhaps the easiest of all e-commerce sites to implement is to simply offer goods or services for sale on a secured part of a Web site. Most commercial Web sites can be adapted for basic e-commerce fairly easily by adding simple HTML forms to accept orders and linking to a secure server to accept credit card payments.

Once you move beyond the most rudimentary of Web stores, software products to support e-commerce applications require a great deal of customisation, and few sellers have the skills required for such work. A commerce server must link a buyer, seller and transaction authorisation agency, and pulling all these players together effectively can be a difficult task.

For these reasons, many sellers chose to outsource all or part of their Web store. How much of your store you chose to outsource will depend on the nature of your business and the availability of relevant skills within your organisation, but here are the options:

• Outsourcing of payment authorisation and processing
  The major part of your Web store is located on your own or your ISPs server. Once a customer has placed an order you link to an external service to authorise and process credit card payments.

• Outsourcing of the complete Web store
  Your complete Web store is created and maintained on a commerce server which manages the whole process from displaying goods through processing orders and payments. All you have to do is ship the goods.