Industry Canada has teamed with four private ventures to help small and medium-sized enterprises, charities and social-service non-profit organizations get into on-line selling.

If you're one of the above and you have a Web site, the Community Storefronts project will teach you how to market on-line, host and improve your site. If you don't have a site, for $350 ($275 for non-profit organizations), Storefronts will help you create a two-page site with all the bells and whistles, including electronic shopping carts, secure credit-card transaction software and even banking.

DoP@y eCommerce Solutions provides the accredited payment system; Strategic Profits Inc. supplies the business model and training plus a Shop Site Pro shopping cart licence; GE Capital Information Technology Solutions delivers the centralized secure hardware system; and the Royal Bank of Canada supplies the programs to reconcile Visa card transactions plus authorization of most major credit cards.

"It works out to about $6,000 in services and products, all for that $350," says John Pagliaro, the royal's Manger for Internet Sales and Marketing, Merchant Services and Point of Sale.

"It's really a starting point for small business, a way to inexpensively allow them to investigate E-commerce."

To day, 100 merchants and 32 non-profit organizations are up and running, with another 50 stores in the works.

"We hope for about 300-plus on-line stores and 60 NPOs within the next eight months," Mr. Pagliaro adds.

The Storefront project works like this:
Industry Canada and the four partners have created a single directory Web site (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/cs) that lists all the stores and NPOs up and running under the program. Click on a site in that list and you're automatically connected.

Then it's a matter of browsing through the two pages of goods offered--extra pages are available at additional cost--putting what you want into that electronic cart and paying by credit card.

The transaction is then shuffled to GE Capital's server. GE sends a receipt to you, the order to the on-line store (the card number is never revealed to the merchant) and the transaction to the royal Bank for processing.

"We provide the on-line store a merchant Visa account as part of our merchant program; they can also get MasterCard from other banks plus American Express if they want," Mr. Pagliaro explains. "There's realtime authorization--the transaction takes only six seconds--and the funds from the Visa sale are deposited in the merchant's account the next day."

"It's just like having a Visa point-of-sale facility in a real store."

The key to on-line success is creating a strategy to make customers aware of the enterprise and drawing them to the site.

To educate merchants, Industry Canada and Strategic Profits held one-day seminars in communities across Canada last month.

The United Way of Greater Toronto is one NPO that has already found an effective use for its Storefront site.

It used the Internet to register participants and accept pledges for its annual CN Tower stair climb, a fund-raising event in late summer. "I understand they even got a $1,000 unsolicited donation through the Web recently. They were really thrilled," adds Mr. Pagliaro.