As the title says, I have no experience working with shopping cart but intend to include one in a website that I am working on. Basically the person wants for people to be able to:
View / Buy Products with credit card
Add products or remove them
Be able to zoom on the product pictures
I should also be able to customize the look of the cart to make it match the existing website.
I’ve been looking at some of the options and Avactis and JShop look interesting. I know HTML/CSS.
they plan to ship to a couple of specific countries and they plan to add the aditional fee to the price of the product. It won’t be included in the product price itself.
You mentioned that you were interested in shipping your jewelry to a few different countries. Will you therefore be looking to charge a different delivery charge per country, and will this be a fixed cost per country or will it vary depending on the total order weight?
Some shopping carts will not allow you to have self-hosted solution and many people need this. Business is growing and hosted solution is too limited sometimes e.g. code is not opened or something else.
Hosted solution is great if you can move your store anytime, e.g. to powerful cloud server if you business will be big enough.
No, they just need a credit/debit card. PayPal has not required an account setup for quite a while now.
Heh heh, you have to make it secure with an ssl certificate ($$$) and the learning curve for setting up the software is pretty steep (in my limited experience, anyhow).
Foxy Cart looks interesting. I’ve never used it, but for someone who just knows HTML and CSS, and wants to built a quick site, it is probably the way to go. You just build a standard website on your web host and then set up a few links to the Foxy Cart web platform.
It’s $19 per month for unlimited transactions, but you’ll still need a payment gateway, like PayPal.
To answer your PayPal question, yes, PayPal does allow customers to use their credit cards without signing up for an account. Based on my experience almost everyone that uses the web on a regular basis has a PayPal account. (Think about it. Do you know anyone who doesn’t?)
As far as I have read, a hosted solution is the most convenient for a person like me who has no prior experience with shopping carts. But I have no issues with choosing a self-hosted one as long as it is secure and isn’t a hassle to setup.
Yes, they plan to ship to a couple of specific countries and they plan to add the aditional fee to the price of the product. It won’t be included in the product price itself.
About PayPal, would the person buying the item need to have a PayPal account? If so, I think this would make the process tedious for some.
If they plan to a lot of products and want a more professional solution and you are using a web hosting company with a c-panel, like BlueHost or DreamHost, you probably already have access to Zen Cart, a free, open source program.
There is a learning curve involved with Zen Cart, but if you can spend a weekend looking through the files, you can probably figure it out. There is also a great user forum. www.zen-cart.com
They will include perhaps 30 or so products, not sure yet. But I think it is a good idea to use a solution that allows for growth, in this case something like Zen Cart or perhaps FoxyCart. I’ll try to look a bit deeper into Zen Cart to see how it works.
Fulfillment is always a critical aspect of
an online store, will they ship themselves
or use a 3rd party to drop ship or complete
the fulfillment of the orders?
Okay. So your cart will need to be able to include shipping charges and sales tax, unless your client wants to include shipping and taxes with the price. I would also start out using PayPal as the payment gateway.
If you don’t have much experience with PHP, and if they don’t plan to list a lot of products (like 12 or less) you could start with a very basic PayPal shopping cart. Just go into your PayPal account and go to Merchant Services and just follow the instructions to add the “Buy It Now” and “Add To Cart”. This is clunky, but it works if you want to get up and running fast. (Note that you’ll need a Premiere or commercial PayPal account to use the shopping cart buttons.)
If they plan to a lot of products and want a more professional solution and you are using a web hosting company with a c-panel, like BlueHost or DreamHost, you probably already have access to Zen Cart, a free, open source program.
There is a learning curve involved with Zen Cart, but if you can spend a weekend looking through the files, you can probably figure it out. There is also a great user forum. www.zen-cart.com
And if you need help and can spend some money. I would go for a commercial solution, like www.cubecart.com (there is a free version of CubeCart, but you probably want to spend the extra money to get the commercial product.) and I have had good results with the basic Squirrel Cart for $129. Squirrel Cart also provides excellent tech support.
What do you plan to sell? Is it a product that needs to be shipped or a digital download?
If you are not selling a lot of products, you might be able to get away with adding some “Buy Now” links to PayPal. If you have a PayPal account, check out the “Merchant Services” section.
There are lots of hosted shopping carts that you can link to and style as if they were on your own server, such as FoxyCart, Shopify and Ejunkie. These options are worth checking out, as you then don’t have to worry about security, PHP etc, but just conentrate on styling the pages.
Instead of a one-off payment, they usually charge by the month.
Other options include free CMSs like Magento, OScommerce and ZenCart, but they require a bit of learning and knowhow, and you have to worry about security then.
