Web hosting resellers can offer their clientele the capacity to conduct e-commerce transactions through the use of electronic storefront software. Small and medium-sized businesses often demand the option to sell their products and services through their single Web hosting company of record. For this reason, most resellers ensure that they can offer their customers a full compliment of easy-to-use, e-commerce solutions that includes a complete storefront, or shopping cart system, and a payment-processing gateway.

In order to fulfill this requirement, most resellers will purchase Web hosting services from higher-tier providers who integrate turnkey e-commerce capacity into their offerings for resale. A popular and stable e-commerce solution that higher-tier providers often offer to resellers to push down the value chain is Miva Merchant.

Miva Merchant is a dynamic browser based storefront development and management system that allows merchants to create multiple online stores from anywhere in the world where there is Internet access. Miva Merchant has a large set of wizards that simplify the process of building a Web store. The browser-based administration interface provides access to an array of sophisticated tools that allows a reseller client's to self-maintain their catalog. Resellers usually are very pleased with such a system, because normally implementation of such a solution is transparent: it is maintained by their higher-tier Web host.

An excellent top-tier host will maintain the entire e-commerce infrastructure developed by a technology company such as Miva Corporation (www.miva.com), while the reseller simply enlarges its client base by selling more hosting accounts with e-commerce functionality.

The goal of most resellers is thus to obtain access to e-commerce resources that they can be resold effectively and inexpensively. In order for e-commerce to become a relatively economical service to be provided by a small to mid-sized reseller, the e-commerce solution must provide instant gratification to both the consumer of products and services, and your customers. In other words, e-store sales must be processed instantly, and order fulfillment must be timely, in order to satisfy users who both purchase and profit from the system.

An e-commerce solution must also require minimal technical support from the reseller's end.

If these goals are achieved, then a Web hosting reseller will be able to successfully provide order-processing services that will satisfy their customers.