Re: ssl certificates, merchant account and ?

by "Nancy J. Foster" <nancyf(at)quillandmouse.com>

Date:	Wed, 14 May 2003 05:59:36 -0700
To:	Doris Kyburz <doris(at)kyburz.net>, hwg-business(at)hwg.org
In-Reply-To:
	todo: View Thread, Original

At 12:27 AM 5/14/03 -0700, Doris Kyburz wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>I am in the process to "rescue" two friends from being kinda ripped off. 
>They pay $720 for hosting/year and $30/month for "domain maintenance". 
>Their site is not big at all, maybe 12MB, and has a little store with 
>about 250 items.
>
>I am collecting now all the information for them to make a new budget.
>
>Here are my questions:
>- One item will be the ssl certificate. How much charge for a SSL 
>certificate is reasonable?
>- Any recommendations for merchant accounts?
>(I have looked up the archives and could not find any answers.)
>- are there any other costs I may have overlooked regarding a shopping 
>cart setup?
>
>Thank you for your insight as always :-)
>
>Doris
>
>
>ps. Thanks for all the input for my earlier shopping cart question. I have 
>found that edatcat (http://www.edatcat.com) suits my needs for this 
>project best.

Hi Doris,

Since we're not supposed to talk dollars and cents on this list, I won't 
discuss specifics. For Security Certificates, we just pass on the actual 
cost to the client. All our clients who take credit cards had the ability 
to do so before their web presence so they didn't need an online merchant 
account. We simply have their shopping cart set up to securely provide our 
client with the necessary information. (Of course, there's always 
PayPal...) As to other costs, we charge our clients an hourly fee for the 
database programming necessary to set up their shopping cart. We also use 
an Open Source shopping cart that we can modify for their needs so we'll 
charge them for the time to make modifications if needed. We also charge a 
slightly higher monthly hosting fee because secured sites need a fixed IP 
address (versus name based hosting).

Lastly, regarding maintenance, that may not be too high, depending on how 
much monthly maintenance is needed. If you want high, we're hopefully about 
to pick up a client with only a 2M site and no ecommerce who used to be 
charged about $500 a month for maintenance and hosting!! They're current 
vendor has graciously cut that in half, but that's still way too high in my 
opinion.

--
Nancy J. Foster
Quill & Mouse Studios, Inc.  http://www.quillandmouse.com
Graphic Design -- Computer Typography -- Website Creation

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