If you are selling a digital product, it may be advisable to use a third party payment processor like Clickbank or Plimus. They take care of all the payments, refunds and the disputes/chargebacks are also handled by them.
There are some large ecommerce websites which spend a lot of money on PPC advertising. But if you try to order anything from the website, atleast 50% of the time, you will get some error during the checkout process and are returned to the home page.
It is both a waste of the buyer’s time and the ecommerce websites money.
Few merchants seem to have a well designed system for error handling while processing payment. I had made a payment using Bill Desk, and since there was an error while processing the payment, I could not note down the transaction id. I then had to wait for nearly 36 hours before the payment could be processed properly and waste a lot of time following up.
An OS Commerce ecommerce website can be designed using the STS system which allows the design in one HTML file. It is simpler compared to designing with a standard OS Commerce module.
Using Fantastico which is available with Cpanel hosting , the process of installation of OSCommerce on your website is simplified to a create extent. The databases are created automatically.
Most web hosting companies include a free shopping cart software for Ecommerce . For some web hosts there is a script which installs the software on the website. The shopping cart software allows the visitor to select a particular item and add it to the list of products he wishes to purchase.
The web designer can create a standard web page and integrate the shopping cart by adding the relevant code to the web page, so that the check out and payment pages look similar to the rest of the website.