Shopping cart control software
Some ecommerce oriented control panel software includes basic shopping cart software, which can be fine for limited ecommerce use. You will still need to have a merchant account to collect credit card income and a payment gateway to communicate between your shopping cart control software and the merchant account. Your web site control panel might include other useful scripts as well, such as forums, guestbook scripts, and chat software. Make a point to explore what your web site control panel offers you before assuming you need to buy a stand-alone package for these additional functions.
Web control panel and auto responders
Auto responders allow you to set up automatic emails based on various criteria. If you can use your web control panel to set these up, you won't need to pay for this as a separate service. Most people need to see something a few times before they will respond. You'll be able to use your web control panel to set up auto responders to send a series of emails to go out at certain schedules once people have opted-in to your mailing list. Then you can create different emails that will go out at different times. For example, the first day someone signs up for your list, they'll get email #1; the second day email #2; and so forth.
Control Panel and FTP Usage
Most control panel software offers something similar. In essence, some people will have the ability to place files on your server and others want. Ftp is a file transfer protocol which most control panel software lets you set up separate user names and passwords to access. So your regular users can get their email but cannot add or delete!) files from your web site. Your ftp users might be an out-sourced web site team. Your web design firm can update your web site at they need to without you having to be present or do anything. But they will not be able to access anything else, like people's email. Also, you might want to set up a "guest" spot on your web site and have on particular folder set aside to exchange files with clients and such. You would use your control panel software to manage the directories and set up special ftp accounts that only have access to particular directories. If you want multiple to have access to a certain set of folders and don't really care who sees them, you can set up an anonymous ftp account.
Subdomains and your web site control panel
Subdomains let you set up URLs like sales.yourdomain.com. These are generally easier for people to remember than yourdomain.com/sales for some reason. Many companies use these to promote certain brands. When you set up subdomains, you can use your web site control panel to set up a totally separate web site or redirect it to some page on your normal web site. Your web site control panel might also offer reports based on your subdomains, so you can monitor traffic and usage of your subdomains. You would still monitor and control these subdomains through a single web control panel.
Your web site control panel
A web site control panel offers you various functions to manage your web site. Typically, these would include a means for setting up subdomains, protecting directories, configuring email accounts, and perform basic system functions. You access the web site control panel after entering a username and password. You can set up different usernames with different administrative functions. You might want to allow individual users to control their email accounts, for example, but not let them have access to other administrative functions.