Do You Need A Website
Merchant Solutions, in essence, provides two things:
■ A “store” account, in which you can create your web store
■ A web-hosting account, in which you can create a web site using a variety of different
tools
The “store” account contains the following items:
■ A store catalog
■ A shopping-cart system
■ All the mechanisms needed to handle sales tax, shipping rates, transaction payments,
and so on
■ The ability to create additional pages, which can contain contact information, a privacy
policy, and so on
The Merchant Solutions store account creates a special form of e-commerce web site;
it provides a very fast way to build a store web site. However, it doesn’t provide as much
flexibility as other methods for building web sites, so some business owners combine the two.
They still need Merchant Solutions to provide the shopping cart and other tools for processing
sales, but they also create a separate web site and combine the two pieces.
They use a webdesign
tool to create a web site and the store’s catalog pages, but use Merchant Solutions
to manage transactions—to set up sales-tax rates, shipping rates and methods, and payment
methods. Because Merchant Solutions includes a full-featured web-hosting account, you can
create virtually any kind of web site in association with your store. You can use a plain old text editor to create your HTML pages if you understand how to do that, then upload them to your
hosting account. To create pages, you could use Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver, or any of
hundreds of other web-creation tools. |
