Website #1 for "Go2Cinemalls.com"
This Store is a highly-modified "Miva Merchant" shopping cart store with "dynamic" pages. Miva stores are extremely popular because of their dependability and, once they are designed and configured, the inventory can be maintained by the store owners with no special web design software (or experience). Miva stores are running around the web with as many as 100,000 products in hundreds of categories.

Website #2 for "Umano Beads "
This store has a very small inventory, and is highly designed, which can be accomplished in traditional "static" html pages. The database and secure page requirements are easily handled by using Paypal's merchant services- an excellent low-cost solution for a small store.

Website #3 for "EricsonGroup Real Estate"
This is an informational site with a lot of bells and whistles, including an interactive flash presentation on the home page. It is really all about image.

Website #4 for "Christmas at Canfields"
This store, or group of stores, exploits the popularity of the various brands by marketing them individually (e.g. "www.markrobertsfairies.net") and uses a larger merchant version of the Paypal shopping cart.

Website #5 for "Topsy Turban" addresses the problem of how to maintain a retail and wholesale business (www.hats-on.net) for the same sensitive product. It also addresses using data-capture in an inobtrusive way to weed out non-legitimate buyers at the wholesale level.

Website #6 for "Bumper 2 Bumper"
This is another informational site for a very aggressive car detailing shop in Southern California. It has a lot of inobtrusive Flash animation and is a lot of fun to constantly change the cars on the splash page.

MORE ABOUT ON-LINE STORES
Everyone who can boot up a PC knows that the big on-line stores have entire departments devoted to maintaining their sites. But what about entrepreneurs or manufacturers that want to “ease in” to on-line sales but have been sticker-shocked at the start-up and monthly costs of building and maintaining such a site? The continuing overhead of SSL certificates, a secure gateway, shopping cart, credit-card merchant accounts, can guarantee a lot of red ink particularly if you are offering only a few dozen products for sale. And then there is the need to retain a web-master who knows the arcane codes for continually re-populating your shopping cart. Fortunately, there is a solution for just about every need out there, and it need not be expensive.

"DYNAMIC" PAGE SITES
These are sites that use an internal data base to put together pages "on-the-fly". Once designed by a competent web designer, these sites can be maintained from within the merchant company by a bright computer-savvy person with no web design experience using only a web browser and inexpensive image editing program (Photoshop Elements?). After experimenting with "open source" sites than can be down-loaded gratis and (for the brave), we've settled on Miva Merchant store architecture. MM offers an interface where we can apply all our web tools (animation, data-capture, table structures) within the proprietary MM codes. These stores can be quite huge and are very dependable, but require a seperate merchant account, and the initial work to conform them to an e-entrepreneur's wishes is not to be underestimated.

Is there a solution that offers DESIGN FLEXABILITY with NO START-UP OR CONTINUING COSTS, other than very low credit card fees? We feel we know what this is at the moment and are using it in the four sites on this page we have created: the PayPal Web Standard solution. Not to be confused with the PayPal ONLY sites of the past, where one had to join PayPal to make a purchase. This product offers a secure shopping cart with a customized banner to match the design of the site as well as custom “add to cart” buttons. This cart gives the customer the choice of using EITHER major credit cards OR their PayPal account, should they have one. For the merchant, it offers instant email notification of all sales info as well as many shipping and sales tax options that one finds only on the more advanced e-commerce sites. Is PayPal doing this as a public service? No, they are using it (during the checkout process) to promote their brand of electronic bank transfers as an alternative to credit cards, but again, the purchaser can click past these offers and use a Visa/Amex without a hitch.

What kind of company can make efficient use of such a simple e-commerce site? And how big a site can be maintained with this approach? To understand this, you must understand the differences between a site (like these) with static pages and those with “dynamic” pages.  Static pages, as the name implies, will remain unchanged in size and content until a web programmer changes them. This makes them ideal from a design point of view.   A dynamic web site is based on a data base creating the pages within parameters set by the designer. For example, let us say your on-line store is for photo equipment. You might have an index that contains the four items: Nikon, Canon, Camera Bodies, Lenses, & Accessories, 

In the case of a static page store, each of these categories would contain overlapping items, e.g.  the Nikon pages would contain Nikon camera bodies, Nikon lenses, and Nikon Accessories.  The Camera lens pages would contain both Canon and Nikon Lenses but no bodies and accessories. And so fourth, creating a lot of duplication and a bulky site that resists change.

In the case of a dynamic page store, when a customer clicks  “Nikon”, the data base would create dynamic page(s) on the fly with all things Nikon, including Lenses and accessories. If “Camera Bodies” was selected, the pages created by the data base would contain both Nikon and Canon (and other) camera bodies, but no lenses and accessories. And so forth. The pages would all have the same header and navigation, but would vary by the defined “search”, which in a large site would contain a customer-defined search field. The length (and therefore the quantity) of these pages is pre-defined by the site programmer usually based on the number of items and ordered (usually) by price.  A dynamic site, with its heart being a data base, can also keep track of available inventory of your products and even be synchronized with e-accounting programs like Quickbooks.

So it should be clear that if your on-line venture will contain A LOT of items or rapidly rotating inventory and prices, a dynamic site should be pursued from the outset. In some cases, these dynamic stores can be configured to be maintained by the on-line merchant (with minimal training) to up-load pictures of new products and prices. Unfortunately,  unless the initial set-up is well thought-out in advance, these stores over time tend to get uglier by the day.

If, on the other hand, your site has a relatively stable line of products with additions coming only a few times a year, a static site like those above offer both design and cost advantages.

A note here that the PayPal shopping cart solutions can work with either type of site and should be given consideration.