eCommerce Solutions

From plug-in shopping cart systems, to custom scripts for selling online information and services, we have ecommerce solutions to fit your needs. We can help with all aspects from secure hosting, to merchant accounts and payment gateways, to custom scripting of order forms and shopping carts.

A Complex Puzzle

eCommerce is a complex puzzle with several pieces. We can help you choose and put together the pieces that will do what you need. A website selling T-Shirts does not have the same eCommerce needs as one that sells access to online infomation or association memberships or concert tickets.

Merchant Accounts

The first piece of the puzzle is a credit card merchant account. In order to take credit card orders, you need a merchant account. Depending on whether you already have a "brick-and-mortar" store, and how much investment you want to make in your online sales at this time, you can use your existing merchant account, or get a new one specifically for online order processing. Through a special arrangement with Authorize.net, we are now able to offer merchant accounts with Authorize.net's superior online payment gateway, at very reasonable rates. Click here to learn more.

Secure Communication

The next peice of the puzzle is a secure page to accept the payment information. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encrypts the data transfered from the client's browser to the server. Our Basic hosting package includes secure SSL webspace under our SSL certificate (for example, https://secure.maiatech.com/yourname/). For a little more, you can have your own SSL certificate, and your own secure webspace ( for example, https://secure.yorudomainname.com/). It is important to understand that SSL is only one piece of the puzzle and does not, by itself, guarantee that the credit card data is stored safely once it is submitted to the server.

Shopping Carts or Order Forms

In order to take your customers orders, you will need some sort of script for a shopping cart or order form processing. Depending on the type of Merchant Account you have, and the types of products or services you are selling, a standard "out-of-the-box" program might serve your needs well, or you might require a custom script to securely process the information and deliver the order and the credit card information to you. Click Here to try a demonstration of a simple Shopping Cart on a real, live web store.

Online Product Catalog/Database

If you have many products or your product list changes frequently, you'll want to manage your online store with an online catalog. Where our simple shopping cart requires manually built HTML product pages, an online catalog automatically creates your product pages and links to the shopping cart based on the contents of the product database that you manage in an easy online interface. Click here for one of our client sites using a database-driven catalog and shopping cart. Again, this is a live site and a real store so don't buy anything unless you really want it.