Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Yahoo Store vs. OpenACS Ecommerce?

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Apparently, Yahoo Store's $40/month and 1.5% cut of every sale does not include credit card processing! They bury the info, but apparently in order to accept credit cards with yahoo store, you must have a merchant account with a separate provider or institution (not Yahoo). And the one they integrate with Yahoo Store, Paymentech, costs $23/month and 2.69% + $0.20 per transaction! Thus this all seems substantially more expensive then they initially lead you to believe.

Seems you can find of lots Appache + PHP + MySQL on Linux providers offering "Ecommerce enabled" hosting for $10 or $15 per month. Annoyingly, even the hosting providers that actually provide useful credit card merchant account info all seem to still purposely obscure the fact that you also have to pay someone else for credit card processing.

I suspect Yahoo Store is more of a managed application, but, given their substantially higher costs over the run of the mill PHP hosting shops, just what do you get for your money?

You folks who have done Ecommerce sites in the past, I realize most such readers here were probably doing much more sophisticated custom sites with OpenACS. But what would you recommend for the smallest, simplest, and cheapest of Ecommerce sites?

Perhaps atypically, this small ecommerce site is going to be run by people who are more or less utterly computer ignorant, but who do have a few computer-savy friends and family members whom they could occasionally call in to answer questions, give advice, or fix disasters.