Ten years ago, the word "eCommerce" was about as rare as a "Smart Phone". Technology was growing so fast that computers were being out-clocked in months. The Internet, though maturing, was still not too familiar with the notion of online business. Sure, we had eBay, PayPal, and Amazon but those services and stores were still learning the ropes. Not to mention the infrastructure required to perform secure "eCommerce" wasn't feasible for the small business.
That's about when I decided to look into hosting an online store myself. At first I looked into eCommerce solutions, which were as numerous as they were new. The one thing they all had in common was the sheer expense in securing a package. They all involved hefty setup costs and year-long contracts paid up-front. To a business with capital, it's not a bad thing to pay all this up front. To a small business entrepreneur, it was a huge road block. On the other hand, I was pretty savvy with programming and computers, so I decided to look into a home-grown solution.
I picked up some books on PHP and MySQL. I was already pretty familiar with Linux, and Apache wasn't exactly hard for me to figure out. I set out to write my own product catalog with shopping cart, though I didn't get far. Even this early on, I realized that there's so much more to doing this than just showing pretty pictures and asking people for their credit card information. I had signed up for PayPal, but at the time, PayPal wasn't as easy and user-friendly as it is now. Further, the security of the website needed to be top-notch. I decided to retire the idea and only sold products the old-fashioned way.
Fast-forward ten years, and things are quite a bit different. There are still expensive eCommerce solutions, most of which offer secure payment processing and guarantee security. Indeed, today's "profit machine" on the Internet has to do with security since the last ten years has shown just how vulnerable we are out here in Cyberspace. On the other hand, we have several secure payment processing solutions that have also come a long way, removing the burden of having a bullet-proof system. What's left is hosting and store software, which has also come a long way.
Ten years ago, the notion of "virtual hosts" was brand new. They were around, but they were also unstable and not recommended for production servers. These days, computers are actually built for virtualization. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then I can briefly explain. Conventionally, you have a computer (hardware) and an OS like Windows (software). You'd run your OS on your computer and do whatever tasks are required. Now picture that your hardware can be shared by multiple copies of Windows, each one acting like it's own computer and you have virtualization. The layers are: [Hardware]->[Host OS]->[Several Virtual OSs]
With Virtual Hosts, the costs of having your own web server have come down significantly. On top of that, Open Source software has become quite the hot topic. The average computer user has no real concern, but most of us that work in the technical industry have heard the term "Open Source". Briefly, Open Source software is usually created by an individual or a small team. They then offer the source up to the community, which in turns helps maintain it with updates, bug fixes, and new features. Not all Open Source software is free, but "free" has become a common expectation when dealing with open software. Companies instead sell the service of support and modification of that software, or they offer to sell commercial licenses and guarantee of uptime. One such projects is the Magento project, which offers a full-featured eCommerce solution for free if you want to do things yourself.
So in our cheap eCommerce recipe, we have virtual hosts ($20/mo for a starter package) and open source software (free!), but we're still missing two key ingredients: Time and Skill. If you're familiar with your hosting environment and you're familiar with the software language your open source solution is written in, then all you need is the Time to do it yourself. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to make this sound easy. Easy isn't a part of this recipe. You can expect long nights of screaming incoherently at your screen, trying to figure out why your store is down or your data is corrupt. The difference is that in my experience, you'll probably spend the same amount of time yelling incoherently at the out-sourced call center, trying to figure out why your store is down or your data is corrupt.
At least this way, you only have yourself to blame.
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