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

Now a new class of products, known as Web storefront creation packages or commerce servers, is emerging. These products, working with existing Web servers and legacy applications, provide tools for calculating taxes and shipping costs, work with a variety of payment schemes, and process transactions securely. Most provide site analysis and reporting tools for monitoring your site's progress. Finally, many provide wizards or libraries of sample storefronts, as well as authoring tools, to help developers build the site quickly.

From a customer's perspective, they allow visitors to register, log on, browse products, place products in virtual shopping carts, and purchase the goods or services securely.

If you are running your own Web server, you will have a large and growing list of packages to choose from.

However, if you intend having an ISP host your Web store then your choice will be more limited. Most ISPs offering access to a commerce server have usually selected one software company to partner with and only offer their solution. In this case it would be best to identify what packages you are interested in and establish which ISPs will support you.

Alternatively, many ISPs allow the use of CGI scripts on their servers and there are a number of ready made CGI scripts available that fulfil many of the required functions of a commerce server. Although use of these scripts is often free of charge there are some limitations to their usefulness. Firstly, most of them are written in a programming language called PERL which, although relatively easy to learn does have some speed limitations and therefore is only really suited for use in Web stores with light to medium traffic. Secondly, some scripts rely heavily on the use of cookies which some Web users regard as a threat to their privacy and are therefore probably best avoided.

Finally, if you want to quickly establish a Web store and have limited or no HTML skills, there are a number of inexpensive storefront creation programs available, usually hosted by the vendor or a partner ISP. These entry-level products typically provide wizards that walk you through the process of setting up a Web store and then generate the site automatically.