ForumsStarting a Business

Have you tried just adding paypal? Paypal premier, with just your name, does not require a ssn or ein, and its free. If you need a full "virtual register", you will have to go for the business account. I believe they charge 3% of the sales.

Hope that helps!
Bizchik

I've developed with Zen Cart for a long time. It is a free software, but you'll need to find out what your server platform is (Unix, Windows?). Zen Cart is PHP based.

Do you have FTP access and control of your website? Webmasters can configure carts for you, but they'll also have access to all of your merchant account information. Be sure to have confidentiality contracts and once the site is built, change your passwords.

If you have basic HTML knowledge, you'd be able to set up Zen Cart yourself. I've been in ecommerce almost 12 years and Zen is the best I've worked with out of the box.

It has a great user interface so you can quickly add products and assign any attributes (sizes of t-shirts, colors, styles, etc.) that can be assigned globally.

It also handles banners, advertisements, specials, featured products, sale products, coupons, gift certificates and you can insert Google adsense code if you want to. And a lot more, there's just too much to mention.

You'll need a merchant account. I've used several. Bank of America has one, but I've also used Authorize.net and Transaction Pro. I won't mention the first one I started out with in 1997. They charged me over $3000 for a 3.5 floppy disk. No kidding. Of course, that was when stuff was really new and we were all baby fish is a large pond.

Cheers!
Karen

If you want to see an example - look at http://www.crafttoys.com/shop