Good Day,

My name is Gary and I have just singed up to Daniweb. I am currently looking into how to setup an ecommerce website for my mother in law who hands makes her own jewlery in South Africa.

What she is wanting is a website to showcase her pieces and have a world wide market.

I have been looking into using a Website template as there seems to be some excellent sites available, with the obvious changes required within either dreamweaver and photoshop, which I am comfortable with doing.

However, this will be an Ecommerce site, so I am unfamiliar with the following:

"Software Required: Hosting with PHP5x and MySQL5x; Apache only (on Unix/Freebsd/Linux/Windows); osCommerce runs on most server specific configurations ranging from dedicated servers to shared servers that utilize different PHP configurations such as register_globals (should be ON) and safe_mode restrictions"

What does this mean?

I am also researching how to setup the actual credit card transaction process once items have been placed into the basket, again any help out there?

Any suggestions on good host providers?

I am very new to this, I have never setup or managed a website before and would be very grateful for any advice or assistance that anyone reading this could offer.

We are based in Durban, South Africa.

Kind Regards
Gary Page

Welcome , its nice having you around here.

Above is set of recommended technologies to use, I think you picked up in some book or article
PHP - is scripting language (there are others too)
MySQL - is database
Apache - is server that supports/enables you to run the above technologies

I'm not sure how much time you wish to spend on learning and developing the site, but you would need to learn a lot about PHP & MySQL

I suggest you use paypal.com. It's very easy to use, and you can have carts or buy it now buttons. Paypal accepts credit cards, among other things.