PayPal, Yahoo Stores, Earthlink, et al.
There are many services available that provide complete site and e-commerce solutions for a single monthly hosting fee. As usual, there are many upside and downside issues to using these services.
Most of these services provide easy access to the catalog for updating product and service offerings, and provide relatively easy order tracking and payment methods. All of them provide merchant account services, and most provide virtually all the online payment options: credit cards, electronic checks, and periodic invoicing for subscription services.
Most also provide email tools. Of course, the databases of user information remains the property of the service. That is a downside, at least to some people. There is also some limited customization available without the need of a specialist, although most require a developer to do extensive design customization.
Many of these services also provide some sort of promotion for the stores in their domain. That is an upside. The downside is that your site is in direct association with hundreds of your competitors, and you have little control over how to differentiate your business from theirs.
Too easy, all too easy...
So why would not everyone simply use these services? What are the advantages of these services over self contained and operated stores? What are the costs of dong business with these systems? What are the savings? What can be done to customize the store front, and how much does that cost? What are the development issues of using these services? How can they be overcome?
This area of the site contains articles, notes, and links to other resources that will help you answer these and other questions.
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Using The Stores (PayPal, Yahoo, etc)
