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Shopping Carts and Credit Card purchasing are not a function of the software, it is a function of your hosting company, a credit card gateway, and a bank.
First, the shopping cart software is provided by 3rd party companies. Some that are used by WebStudio customers include PayPal and EasyCart. There are a bunch of others. What happens is the shopping cart company provides you with graphics and HTML. You add that to your WebStudio pages. You don't have to know the HTML, just add what they give you to WebStudio. In some cases you'll have to modify the HTML but you won't have to understand what it means or does. An example would be to add the names of your products, prices, sku numbers, etc. But that is easy.
The second thing is that the cart software is the software that provides sales incentives features such as sales, cross product promotions, gift certificates, coupon redemtions, etc. So you'll want to make sure the service you purchase has those features.
Some hosting companies offer shopping carts for their customers. Others host it themselves and your site just links to it from your hosting service. Either way works fine. The cart company's website would have a "control panel" that allows you to add product, set shipping info, tax info, etc. These carts would then create the pages of your catalog for you. Other carts make you do that by modifying HTML on your pages, you create the catalog's pages. The first way lets you do it easier, the second lets you have more control over how it all looks.
Credit cards: There are a few pieces to to this. First, you need a merchant bank account. This is a business checking account that accepts the funds from the credit card transactions.
Next, you need a "credit card gateway". This connects your ordering software to the credit card company's computer and to your bank.
Next is the secure server and pages to gather the information for the order; name, address, credit card #, etc. The secure server encrypts the information so no one can steal it when it is transmitted over the net.
Some banks and gateway company's have an all in one approach to the credit card gateway, merchant account and secure pages. You order their service and they give you secure pages on their site that a customer is sent to when they click "Buy" on your site. It gets the appropriate info from the customer, then sends it thru the gateway to the credit card company for approval. If it is approved, the customer is informed, the funds are transfered to your account, everyone takes their cut, you and the customer are informed that they have purchased something, what it is, where to ship it.
We use Wells Fargo Bank for our merchant account and gateway. We host our own secure server and pages.
The advantages of doing it with a bank that handles it all for you is it is very simple and quick to get up and running. The disadvantages is you lose some control over the purchasing process, it is difficult to hook all the pieces together...that means you may need a software engineer to do it for you.
So, to answer your questions, Yes WebStudio can handle all of this. You'll have to decide on a shopping cart to use, and a vendor for the credit card pieces.
For more help, go to our on-line forum at http://www.webstudioforum.com
Post a message in the WebStudio Forum section asking for help with shopping carts and credit card processing when using WebStudio. 35% of the people with business sites that use WebStudio have shopping carts and credit card capabilities on their sites. Many of them frequent the forum and are more than eager to help you get started looking for the right pieces and then help you get it all running when you build your site.
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