Forum Moderators: buckworks
Does anyone have any advice????
It all depends on what your looking for. If its a small time program your looking for there are many free sources for such programs on the web.
Some of these are not far away from cut and paste jobs, or you maybe have to change some text here and there in some files to get the cart running.
You can also do a site search on here, the links at the top left.
Hope this helps!
Also, if you're willing to pay the hosting fees, Yahoo Stores has online store building tools, and you can link to your Yahoo Store from your main website quite easily (or you can have your entire website hosted on Yahoo Stores). For Yahoo though, you will still need to be able to process your own tansactions, either through a regular business merchant account (if you have one) or through an online payment service.
Keep reading up in here and by next year youll be looking for a custom made one to satisfy all your new ideas :)
A great option for remote shopping cart is Mal's Ecommerce [mals-e.com], which is absolutely free. It works for check payments and PayPal and ProPay (both 3rd party processors) and if regular merchant account processing is an option in the future all it takes is simple changes. It interfaces with several processors. If there is a storefront, credit card info can be retrieved and entered through the regular merchant account.
For other than big sites products can be on HTML pages and linked to secure pages for ordering, regardless of the cart or the platform.
Choices may depend on budget, but I remember Americart was mentioned a while back as having an option for static product pages. I believe there's an annual fee.
Although it would certainly work for hand-processing transactions through ProPay, it didn't look like they 'seamlessly' integrated with eachother.
Some have had increases in their web ordering, since the people don't have to join like they do with PayPal. Some use both, and a great number of them use Mal's, since they have home made sites or sites at free hosts where they can't use regular shopping carts. It's also cheaper for them if they have sites done for them, because they can use cheap hosting and the code is very simple so they can maintain their sites themselves.
There is another way. And that is to create "OTHER NON-SECURE PAYMENTS" but call it Visa/MasterCard. When the buyer clicks "Checkout", their order is partially done. The sellers logs into ProPay and uses the Get Paid, Request by E-mail feature. Send the the buyer a secure invoice for the total. This method minimizes data entry for the seller.
My clients also had no problem processing payments too, which surprised the -hit out of me.
Have also used bigstep.com, when it was free. It's still very good and even lets you upload your own HTML for total customization of cart and catalogs. But now mid priced. Great company though, very trustworthy and they do what they say they will.
These are both "dummies" types and both are 3rd party ASPs. Both support low-maintenance automatic online credit card processing and will help you get an account.
I went by and checked out digitalplacebo.com. It is definately simple and seemed to be a good deal as far as quick and simple carts seem to go. I have a couple of questions into them pertaining to tieing into existing sites, notification of orders, contractual oblications. I will post the answers here when I get them.
