Web Hosting E-Commerce rules and sites
 

If we wanted to set up a Web Site that does E Commerce but we are located in very remote country... where and what site would you use for web hosting?

We'd want one that could be hooked up to a foreign bank account (but this bank is FDIC insured and does have an office in the US mainland but it is a very minor bank with maybe only four banks) or we can legally set up accounts in America as well easily if we wanted to but want to avoid all the US red tape if possible.

Shipments would take place from a remote country world wide and the taxation would be done locally I would assume as the shipments are going from one place... but since the transaction is being processed on line in a different country (say you host out of Germany or Hong Kong) and maybe the pmt is going to a third country (USA then to our country) or maybe not... what the tax and legality of such items?

With money laundering a hot button I would assume hooking up e commerce to foreign banks to have the potential to be problematic...

How much in sales are you talking about?

Paypal might be the easiest way to process the payments, using an open source ecom package like zencart. I know Paypal supports any country in the world as far as I know. You could also look at Google Checkout or the new Amazon.com payment services. This way you completely avoid red tape, merchant accounts and other stuff.

Thought about this but not everyone is happy opening a paypal account and people in our remote location CAN not open a paypal account so we want to offer MC / VISA maybe AMX and paypal. Paypal I do have merchant account already, no problems there.

Volume is always the key isn't it... We expect to have four sites offering different items and doing about 10,000 USD at the start (based our our email clients now and already talking to them about this) and expansion when we move from a PO System to a CC system on all four products we anticipate it could reach 30 - 40 K a month in short time.

But due to our own experiences with paypal and such we want to process in other ways as well. If feasible and possible.

We're even talking about linking into MoneyGram (not Western however) for pmts via money order.

BTW... we do have merchant accounts with this foreign bank... however they are FDIC insured and they are an international bank with an office in HNL Hawaii so they are working with US Treasury etc... For many accounts they assume this is a US bank and can do ACH and such from this bank no problem (so far and knock on wood). However we might be shipping from two locations.

HOWEVER... this bank does not do some items... so I"m not sure if they can work with every e commerce site out there... like our local CC processing is non existant.

Looking at the site being wrote and maintained out of a group in Thai and hosted elsewhere...

You don't need a Paypal account to do basic credit card purchases.

Yes we know this... but we not want to relay solely on paypal.

What ScottC is suggesting is that you create a business account with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/we...merchant&nav=2 and your users will not have to sign-up to pay with a credit card.

PayPal charges a small fee to complete the transaction but credit card companies charge something similar for merchants.

You can also use something like Google Checkout though I am not sure your country is supported.

I am not sure what you mean by "relying solely on PayPal".

OK thanks, sometimes it takes a 2x4 across my head to understand.... :D