Small Businesses and the Outsourcing of e-Commerce?

Zzzt asks: "I work at a very small advertising agency & production company, doing various electronic media projects, including small websites. In anticipation of our clients going elsewhere, my boss decided we should offer development services for commerce websites, complete with credit card transactions and the like. For those out there who have created these sites, is it worth it for a small company to take on such a project, considering maintanance, liability, and other issues that will come up? Or should we just outsource the whole thing? For a medium to low-end HTML programmer, are there pre-canned packages that will most of the work for me?"

Comments

Not to attack you in particular

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But I see more and more the trend towards businesses going toward the lowest bidder. That and the lack of certification of e-commerce service providers are, I predict, going to seriously inflate the degree of credit card number theft, as people slap databases and webservers on the same machine or trust the webserver, or improperly secure one or the other.

HTTPS is a joke for e-commerce. No one breaks into a router and sniffs for credit card numbers. They go after poorly secured databases of tens of thousands of numbers.