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.
