So you decided to start doing business on the Internet and now you need to get started from scratch to finally be ready to sell your services or products, but where to start and who can help?

I have been many times through this process and every time it is the same questions I ask myself!

Where do I find the hosting that I need for my Website?

What you need to consider is how big your website is and how much traffic you expect to hitting your website, since we assume you are serious about your new business venture, then you should  decide to find a cheap but reliable and stable dedicated hosting plan. I looked into Liquid Web and The Planet, both have starting plans from $69 and a very low setup fee, since The Planet messed completely up my credit card for not so long a time ago, and are very complicated to deal with if you are outside of the US, then I would recommend Liquid Web.

Now you have your hosting in place and can start uploading your website! Uups, you need to figure out how your website should look and if it would be of benefit for you to use a CMS or Shopping Cart.

Shopping Cart or CMS?

So I while I started my business I have been looking at several solutions both in regards to a CMS solution and a regular Shopping Cart solution. It will depend very much on what your business is, I will give you 2 great suggestions here;

If you are going to sell electronic downloads, e-books, products (of any kind) or something else that need to be downloaded or shipped after Payment, then you should look into a shopping cart like OSCommerce which is free at widely supported by millions of people, a much smaller solution and which costs $25 is Pphpldshop.com, it is very easy to install and easy to customize, the support is, sorry to say so, a bit slow, but it works great.

An example of the PHPLD shopping cart can be found here: shop.cclogic.com

If you are going to offer services which don’t can be downloaded immediately or accessed after payment I would defiantly go for a CMS solution, a good CMS software will have a lot of extensions to advanced your needs and is easy to customize and maintain. It is crustily of importance for you to install a CMS which is supported instantly with security updates and buck fixes and where new versions are released on a regular basis. My best suggestion for you is to use :   Joomla is also supported by millions of people and you get everything you need, in fact with Joomla you are able to extend your website to a large corporate professional website with less effort and for a few bucks.

The Design and Logo
Now you need a good designer, please avoid for any price services which will charge you several thousand dollars, if you just need to get started, I made a very bad experience with a company OGOsense.com they are crocks and took $ 1.800 from me, what they did is looking professional, they will send you massive of e-mails with questionnaires and a lot of other crap you don’t want to look professional. My result was that they then took a cheap template from: Joomla Templates and put it online. Stay away.

No find a good template that fits into what you have in mind you can find many great templates and later on get them customized for less than $100.

For logo design I highly recommend the service of Business Logo, they are fast and very reliable to deal with, the results of their works is professional, the website is here:  BusinessLogo.net

Accepting Credit Card Payments
Now you are almost done and ready to start selling your services and products on the Internet.
To be able to accept payments on your website I would recommend you to take a look at the marked, and to find a reliable payment processor which is difficult and where you ran the risk to get into a trap. During my more than 9 Years of Experience in the Internet Business, I have seen a lot.

For startup business you should look into 2co.com, paypal.com, alertpay.com and even moneybookers.com, they are all 4 companies which have been in the payment processing business for many years now and they have grown to huge multimillion companies which don’t disappear overnight.

Once you have grown your own business to be a small or even medium sized company with a monthly sales volume of let’s say approximately $15.000 you should look into becoming your own Merchant Account and connect your website directly with a payment gateway, a good start would be cclogic.com they are only working as consultancies, but have been in the business like the first mentioned 4 companies for many years.

They will provide you with the reliable and trusted solution you want.  With the large network of Banks and Payment processors they have, you will be in good hands.

Beside to accept credit cards you should also look into other payment methods, you have optional possibilities to Accept ACH Check processing, Debit Card processing like Visa Electron or Maestro, Bank Transfer payments, Phone Billing and much more… Ask your payment service provider for what other payments methods they offer.

Most important for you is, the payment gateway provider MUST be PCI compliant, here is the official website for the same: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ and at least Level 1, this is not something you need to worry about what it is about, just make sure your Payment Gateway provider is compliant. This is a second level of security for you and your business. If anyone tells you they are in process, or they use HackerSafe.com, RUN RUN RUN and stay away, it is not what we speak about. We want a fully compliant PCI Level 1 payment gateway, and we want to see a VALID certificate