Annette Jackson owns a small crafts store in central Missouri. ...

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Annette Jackson owns a small crafts store in central Missouri. She wants to expand her stores reach outside the region by selling online. She asked you to help her estimate how much it might cost in the first year to create and operate an online store with a catalog of about 100 items and about 20 transactions per day on average. Annette wants you to investigate two CSP offerings and report back to her what you find. Because her store is small, limit your research to basic commerce services. Annette would like to consider the following information for the two CSP offerings:
   
 

 
• Costs: initial setup fee, monthly fee, and transaction fees

 
• Amount of disk space the CSP would provide

 
• Promotion and marketing opportunities

 
• Customer communications capabilities, such as automated e-mail confirmation of orders

 
• Shopping cart or other order entry mechanism

 
• Storefront-building wizards for creating a new store

 
• Web analytics reports available from the CSP with information about site visitors, number of hits to the Web site, and similar metrics.

 

  Use your favorite search engine to find CSPs that might meet Annettes needs. Produce a report of about 400 words summarizing your findings.

Question 2

Your friend Faye Anderson wants to set up a small Web site devoted to gardening. She believes her many years of experience in gardening give her an understanding of the kinds of gardening tools, fertilizers, soil-amendment products, herbicides, pesticides, and plants that appeal to the serious gardener. Right now, Faye does not want to sell anything, although she might change her mind in the future. She merely wants to display pages of plant photography, write and store short how-to papers for novice gardeners, and provide links to other gardening tips on the Web. She expects the site to have about 100 pages in total. She wants your advice on whether to self-host the Web site or use a service provider to start her endeavor. Use your favorite search engine to locate information on the cost of using a service provider to host a Web site. Then, estimate what Fayes proposed Web site might cost to design and implement. Also estimate annual maintenance and operating costs. Write a 200-word summary of your findings.

[shailee]

Answer to Question 1

Yahoo Small Business:

• Web hosting (5.99 per month  no setup fees):


• Free domain


• Support  24 hr phone and e-mail


• Site pages  unlimited


• E-mail addresses  unlimited


• Disk space  500 GB


• Data transfer  500 GB/month


• Sell online (10.95 per month  no setup fees)


• Domain included


• Less than 12K in monthly sales


• 1.5 transaction fee


• Data Driven Recommendations from Live Web Insights


• Create a custom online store with our easy-to-use tools


• Credit card and PayPal processing

Answer to Question 2

Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) could be considered for Web site design. This involves choosing a template (free or paid). With respect to Web hosting:

HostGator (www.hostgator.com) - 3.96 per month:

• Single domain


• Unlimited disk space


• Unlimited bandwidth


• Shared SSL certificate