A logical step for most businesses or non-profit organizations that have a presence on the internet is to allow customers the ability to purchase products or donate directly through the website. The convenience of e-commerce not only saves customer's time, but it can also save your organization a great deal of labor and cut down on credit card processing fees.

Let us help you to increase sales by offering secure payment options. When you accept secured payments online, it will give your customers the confidence to order without hesitation

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How Does E-Commerce Work?

Their are a couple of items that your website will need before allowing customer to purchase items online. They are a...

• Merchant Account,
• Credit Card Processor, &
• Shopping Cart

When a customer clicks on the order or donate button, there are hidden codes within the web page that pass the order on to a secure and safe shopping cart.  The cart stores the product's coding and displays the item. It will then asks for the appropriate billing, shipping, and personal information (no credit card data is requested yet).

After the customer has filled out all of the required data in the cart, they select a payment option and are forwarded to the credit card processor. This processor allows for a variety of credit card and denomination options.

Following the payment process, money is posted to your merchant account. This is an account set up for all funds that are captured by credit card for your business.

Note: An optional tool called "Virtual Terminal" will also allow you to post payment to the merchant account manually with telephone and mail orders.

"Donations Only" Shopping Cart
Standard Price: $149.00 Installation/Setup

Donations for non-profit organizations are set up through Google Checkout. Google offers a low 2% and $0.20 per transaction processing fee for all donations.

NOTE: Google Checkout Donations have FREE processing until January 1, 2008!

"Standard" and "Custom" Shopping Carts
Standard Price: $399.00 Installation/Setup + Product Coding
Custom Price: $599.00 Installation/Setup + Product Coding

The shopping cart system that Cornerstone typically utilizes is run by Mals E-Commerce. This powerful application allows for a wide variety of options in the cart and during the checkout process. Payment processing for all carts is currently only offered through the PayPal processing system. PayPal rates are lower than the majority of banking merchant accounts today. In addition, PayPal keeps all of your money in their high-rate money market accounts until you manually withdraw it to your own bank account.

Cart installation is considerably easier during the initial setup of the website, however, it can be installed after your site is built. If the products are being coding during site build, the price is $2.99 per item. Products that are coded after the site is online cost $4.99 each.

Standard Cart
This cart has a one time setup fee of $399.00. There are no recurring costs associated with this type of system. The standard cart is ideal if you do not mind having customers pay on the template based PayPal Standard processor. The maximum number of orders allowed through the Mals E-commerce cart each month is 1000.

Custom Cart
A custom cart setup and installation costs $599.00. Because of the upgrade to PayPal Payments Pro and the Mals E-Commerce Premium account there are regular monthly fees of approximately $38.00/month (varies based on monthly or annual payment). This cart provides a seamless payment process. Customers will never leave your website and PayPal will be operating in the background of your site. In addition, the number of orders allowed on your site per month is unlimited.

Let us help you choose the correct cart.  Contact Cornerstone >

Private SSL Certificate
Price: $49.98 Installation

If you have an e-commerce website you will most definitely need an SSL certificate. Each website that is used for gathering and transmitting customer's information should use an SSL certificate in order to guarantee the safety of this information. Most of the Internet users expect any personal information they provide via the Internet to remain confidential and integral. Many people will never buy your products or services online unless they are sure that their details will be secure. The SSL certificate is the only way to secure your online transactions and to show your customers that you really value the confidentiality of their data. Using an SSL certificate is essential if you wish to have a truly successful e-commerce website.

A Shared SSL certificate is included with each Cornerstone Website shopping cart account. It guarantees that any data transmitted through a site using this SSL certificate will be secure. The shared certificate, however, is not the best choice for an e-commerce website because it will always display a note that the SSL certificate is not issued for the customer's domain. This note may cost a loss of customers and no e-commerce site would like that to happen. We strongly recommend a private SSL certificate to be used by each e-commerce website.

Purchase a private SSL certificate for your website >