Can anyone help me get all of the right information in how to design a e-commerce site built on a mac. Everything from what software to use to track and maintain the database to how to create the gateway for the merchant account from PayPal.
I have created web sites before but never done a e-commerce.
My client is going through earthlink to host his site but I do not know what else I need to cover everything else.

All comments are welcomed and appreciated greatly.
I am on a time senstive deadline so please help.

P2C

Developing it on a Mac is no different then developing t on a PC or Linux.

You need:

1) A shopping cart with order management
2) A merchant account with payment gateway and/or Paypal
3) SSL certificate (if you use a merchant account with payment gateway)

Hi, thank you for your reply,

can you recommend on what shopping cart software and SSL app I need to use?
I am using Dreamweaver in the Adobe CS 3 bundle, my client is using earthlink to host the site and wants on PayPal to be the gateway to make the purchases from his site to go to his bank account.

Again thank you for your assistance.
P2C

There are a ton of shopping carts out there with various features and such. You will need to make a list of required functionality and prioritize them and then see what shopping cart matches up to it best. Or you can create one from scratch which may take longer but will be a perfect fit for the website. Naturally Paypal support would be one of the requirements.

You can purchase an SSL certificate quickly, easily, and affordably from godaddy.com.

What would you recommend: the site I am building is for a small company that is selling shirts for both men and women and hats. small operations and not huge. another aspect of the site is to promote awarness of the california bear. the client wants the site to be a vechile to show that the cal bear is making a come back and to have people involved in persevering this animal and also the environment.

So he wants clips of video he shot to be streamed into the site. Sort of like the movie trailers you see from Apple's Quicktime section. I downloaded the quicktime streaming app but now wondering if there is anything else I need in order to make this all happen.

The shopping cart is the very first thing I need to take care. your recommendations would be great. I am not sure what I would need based on what I just wrote with his current inventory.

Thanks
P2C

I can't recommend a shopping cart as I write custom solutions for my clients. But if you're selling typical products virtually every shopping cart will suit your needs. In this case you should be looking for one that is easy to skin so you can integrate it directly into their website.

The content aspect can be done through a simple CMS of which there are a million to choose from. The video also won't be part of the shopping cart and probably will be custom written by you.

Do I also need to have a databased in order to keep track the items as well the sku numbers?

Speaking of which how do i generate sku numbers for the shirts and hats? Does each shirt with a different size and color need a sku #?

Thank you
P2C

You will need a database but the shopping cart will take care of that for you. You only need sku numbers if you wish to have custom numbers like that. Otherwise the shopping cart will take care of creating unique identifiers for each item. It will also help to manage sizes and inventory as well.

ok, all of this helps out greatly, but which shopping cart do you recommed since he is only trying to sell less than 50 items online?
I think i would want a cart that is also able to handle large quanities later in the future.
Any one you can think of that fits this would be fine with me but I have no idea where to get the cart or which one would be better than another
P2C

Once you are selling more then 2 or 3 items the number of items becomes irrelevant. 5 or 50,000 it's all the same.