 Overview
A very liberal definition of e-commerce is simply "doing business online". However, e-commerce is more commonly understood as the ability to receive secure online payments with a shopping cart, merchant account (for credit card processing), and SSL security.
Any website can support e-commerce with these three technologies:
- Shopping Carts
 A shopping cart is a web application that acts as a Web sites's product or service catalog, and ordering process. It allows your site visitors to select items for sale, review what has been selected, make modifications (if necessary), and purchase.
- Internet Merchant Account
A merchant account is an agreement between you (or your business) and a financial instituition. They are necessary in order for you to accept credit cards on your Web site. Your shopping cart will connect to a merchant account to validate credit cards and transfer funds from your customers bank accounts to yours.
- SSL Security
 SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a protocol that enables a web browser and a web server to communicate securely. If you've been to a Web page, and  noticed a padlock at the bottom of the browser, or the web address change from "http" to "https", you are seeing examples of a Web site that is utilizing SSL security.
Why WestHost
We include the two most popular shopping carts (osCommerce and Miva Merchant) with our business hosting plans. We have partnered with two of the best merchant account providers online (payQuake and e-onlinedata). Finally, WestHost clients have access up to 128-bit SSL security across all our servers with a shared SSL certificate at no additional cost. We can also help in obtaining and installing private SSL certificates through our partnership with GeoTrust and RapidSSL. Please visit our SSL information page for more details on obtaining your own certificate. |
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