E-Commerce Websites

Online stores designed to get your products out the door

Contact Fast F Today!
Website Portfolios: Favorites | Health Care | Construction / Home Improvement | Business & Technology | Tourism | Ecommerce

Your website is exceptionally well done, and the handling of the Nacho Libre property is truly wonderful." -an entertainment industry executive

There is a lot to making an online store work well. At Fast Forward we have done many successful stores, in a variety of industries. We can help make your store a success too.

Set-up of an online store requires specialized shopping cart software to provide for placing orders and processing of payments securely. While there are many options, our preferred solution in almost all cases is the Miva Merchant 5 shopping cart.

Miva Merchant is the most widely used off-the-shelf store software in the world. It is highly customizable, so it is a good fit for the vast majority of store applications. Fully custom software could easily cost five or ten times as much, so we avoid recommending that unless the client’s requirements simply cannot be met by the Miva cart.

Miva carts are not expensive, but there are also truly cheap solutions. However, these involve taking the customer off your website to an online processor’s site. This looks amateurish and will scare away a significant number of visitors.

Because there are so many possibilities as to what will be required of a given store, we provide a multi-page checklist to clients early in the design process (often before a contract is signed) so that we know exactly what it will take to build a store that provides what the client needs. Many possibilities require the use of “add-on” modules which may entail an additional charge (usually very moderate). We prefer, and we find our clients prefer, that we establish upfront, as much as possible, the answers to these questions.  We will assist you with our advice on the best choices for your store, however, you know your business better than we do.  The choices are (of course) ultimately yours.

Your online store can be hosted anywhere you like, but it must be possible for the store software to run on their hosting servers. With the Miva cart, if we host the website for you, that capability (and license to use the Miva cart software) is provided on a monthly rental basis. Therefore hosting of on-line stores involves a slightly higher setup charge and monthly fee.

Online stores can be set up without online payment processing. In that case, the order would simply be emailed to you, and you run their card manually. We can also assist you in choosing an online payment processor, and we are experienced in the technical details of making them work with your store.

One additional option with an online store is obtaining your own “secure certificate.” This helps to build confidence and costs under $200 per year. We can assist you with this or you can use the secure certificate provided by the hosting service.

View our Online Store Design Portfolio