# E-Commerce or Web hosting help



## degame10 (May 29, 2006)

Which is better to do E-commerce or Web hosting and then add pay pal? 

With E-commerce its already set-up for online store.

What is the difference?


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> Which is better to do E-commerce or Web hosting and then add pay pal?


Not sure what you mean by each of the terms.



> With E-commerce its already set-up for online store.
> 
> What is the difference?


At the basics:

ecommerce is basically just selling things online.

web hosting is just a place to store your files (images, HTML pages, pictures, etc)

some places offer "ecommerce web hosting" meaning they will provide you with a shopping cart (like cubecart, zencart, oscommerce, etc) already installed on your hosting account.

A shopping cart will make it easier for you to manage your products, orders and customers. It sort of automates most of the process of making individual webpages for each of your t-shirt designs and handles the "add to cart" and "checkout" functions that an online store needs.

A shopping cart can be easy or hard to setup. Some hosts do most of the work for you so that all you have to do is figure out how to add your products and decide which payment methods you will accept.

Paypal also offers an "add to cart" and "checkout" feature that some online stores use to accept payments.

If you go this route, then you will have to create product pages for all of your designs and you won't have a stored database of all your customers and orders.

I think with a shopping cart, it makes things much easier to manage and gives the shopper a better interface for browsing and buying on your site (the paypal only interface makes a window popup when you add something to the shopping cart which isn't too user friendly in my opinion).

Most shopping carts are preconfigured to accept PayPal as a payment option (you just have to enter your PayPal email address in the settings). A shopping cart will also help you expand later on if you want to accept credit cards through a regular merchant account. It will also help you to accept mail orders (many shopping carts have a mail order option that will allow the customer to print out an order form with the items from their shopping cart already filled in).


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## lawaughn (Jul 5, 2005)

If you go through an already set up ecommerce plan then you end up paying more.

You can get your monthly hosting for less than $10 a month. 
And install a free shopping cart yourself.

Try. www.zencart.com

www.oscommerce.com

Most hosting plans come with a cpanel program whiich has a lot of preinstalled add pm that you can add to your sitr with just a few clicks.

You can use a free shopping cart and have someone customize it at www.getafreelancer.com for around $35 is you want your logo add and a few graphics added on.

It's very good to learn basic html just so you can do simple updates no matter which way you choose to go.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> Try. www.zencart.com
> 
> www.oscommerce.com


If you are looking to install your own shopping cart, I would suggest cubecart (www.cubecart.com) over zencart or oscommerce (for ease use).

lawaughn is right though. It's usually *cheaper* to just get a regular hosting package and then install the ecommerce stuff yourself. Sometimes it's "*easier*" to just by the package, especially if you aren't technically inclined.


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