You've got a double post there; you might want to delete (or at least edit to one line) one of them.
Quote:
I would like to know how to set up a decent yet inexpensive website for online sales? One that would be immune to most forms of hacking and safe for online purchases. What software would you suggest? Just kidding.
No, I think that would just be asking for disaster. How can one track who's paid, who's check bounced, bank fee's for rubber checks, charge-card fees, returned units, servicing repairs, shipping expenses? No thanks!
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Answering this seriously, the Yahoo Store works very well for a lot of people and small companies. I've never been very fond of it personally, but it works for a lot of people.
As for tracking who's paid, whose check bounced, etc., there's a legacy technology that works very well for a small company, and that doesn't expose any customer data on the Web: it's called a ledger. Yeah, the paper kind. They still work just fine. If Cherrypal has such problems with data security online, maybe what they need to do is go over to Staples, buy a ledger book (you can still get them) and a package of pens (quill pens are not mandatory), and start writing. Also a pack of index cards for customer data, and a box to put them in. A pain in the neck? Sure. But it beats sharing their customers' private data with every random hacker on the planet, and having people making fun of their company on MobileRead.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. A paper record system is far from perfect, but if their security situation is as people have said, it's good enough to keep the company going while they work on setting up something better. That's something people (including me) have a hard time realizing: Good-enough now is better than perfect later, because if you don't have something
now you're not going to
have a later to worry about.