Your Mobile Commerce Site: Work Behind the Scenes

By Janine Warner, David LaFontaine, and Lee Andron from iPhone and iPad Web Design For Dummies

Broadly speaking, the back end of your mobile commerce site includes all the things that your customers don’t see. Think of this as your stockroom where you store all your stuff on shelves, next to filing cabinets and order sheets.

You use the back-end features of your m-commerce solution to:

Enter product and pricing information
Manage shipping and tax options
Configure any other features provided by the m-commerce service you use

The back end of your m-commerce site also has to integrate smoothly with your payment solution. If you choose a service like the Google Merchant (which is part of Google Checkout), you get everything you need in one easy package.

If you want a more customizable shopping cart that offers mobile services, consider a shopping cart such as ZenCart, a free, open-source option, or Magento, a premium service. Keep in mind that you have to integrate the cart features with a transaction service yourself.

Google and PayPal offer many levels of service, so you can use Google or PayPal as an all-in-one solution for simple shopping sites, or you can use Google or PayPal just to handle the transactions if you use a more sophisticated shopping cart, such as ZenCart or Magento.