Another oscommerce contribution i recommend installing would be a good meta tag contribution. This one is particularly easy to install and works a treat for creating unique meta content and thus increasing your chances of getting more pages indexed in search engines.
If you plan on using the authorize.net gateway as your payment processor you need to make sure that the hosting companies server has CURL complied into PHP with SSL support, without this you wont be able to use authorize.net as your payment processor. Oscommerce does have many other payment gateways to use, such a Paypal which will work on any server.
If you are serious about doing transactions online you should really consider getting a SSL certificate, SSL = Secure Socket Layer
A lot of hosting companies now offer a shared SSL certificate for free, included in the hosting costs, this would be OK for a start but you may want to think about getting a dedicated SSL certificate for you site.
A shared SSL certificate means just that, every site that is hosted on the hosting companies server will be sharing the same certificate. Also your sites secure pages will be redirected through the hosting companies main site that has purchased the certificate. While this is a cheap/free method of using a SSL cert it doesn't look good to visitors and may put people off ordering from your site.
A dedicated SSL is much better, only your site will use the certificate, They can be bought from as little as $20, that is if it is bought independently of your hosting company. Hosting companies may charge more, but they may offer to install it for you free of charge.
When purchasing the SSL certificate you must make sure you have your on IP address not a shared IP address as you will need this to obtain your certificate. You will also need to decide whether to install the SSL certificate on the www version or non www version of your domain, you cant install it on both. You can only have one certificate per IP address.
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