This project will help develop your Internet skills in commercial services for hosting an e-commerce site for a small startup company.

You would like to set up a Web site to sell towels, linens, pottery, and tableware from Portugal and are examining services for hosting small business Internet storefronts. Your Web site should be able to take secure credit card payments and to calculate shipping costs and taxes. Initially, you would like to display photos and descriptions of 40 different products. Visit Yahoo! Small Business, GoDaddy, and Volusion and compare the range of e-commerce hosting services they offer to small businesses, their capabilities, and costs. Also examine the tools they provide for creating an e-commerce site. Compare these services, and decide which you would use if you were actually establishing a Web store. Write a brief report indicating your choice and explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Instructions:

This assignment allows you to explore two important information system trends. First, you will investigate what is necessary to open an Internet business. Second, you will be introduced to cloud computing, in the form of Web page hosting.

To submit the complete assignment, you must:

o.Create a spreadsheet to compare the three identified e-commerce hosting sites and the e-commerce hosting site that you find. Ensure that your comparison includes

(1) evaluation criteria based on customer requirements and other factors you deem to be important and

(2) the raw data and an assessment for each hosting site for each evaluation criterion.  For instance, you may include as a criterion "Storage" and find one web host offers 10 GB.  The raw data is 10 GB; an assessment might be "H", "M" or "L" OR a number from 1 (low) to 5 (high) or other evaluation that you choose.

o.Prepare a PowerPoint presentation that represents the presentation you would give to management explaining your selection. It should explain all the criteria that you included in your evaluation, the strengths and weaknesses of each hosting alternative; it should also identify your choice and the reasons why you made this choice. For each slide, include "notes" that represent what you would say if you were giving the presentation.