Forum Moderators: buckworks
When I'm visiting a new store I'll have a good look around and make a decision on whether the store has a "good feel" about it and whether I trust them with my details. I'll often run through a dummy order and abandon to see how the checkout sizes up.
So the dilemma for the store owner is balancing a professional and smooth looking checkout flow on the same site with the pragmatics of making it clear that orders are safe and my details are not sitting in an anonymous unsecured database somewhere.
So the question is, does transferring the user to a third party checkout form give the buyer more of the safe fuzzy warm feeling or is it a turn off for perceived amateurism of the checkout process?
As a buyer, I have no problem with going on to the payment provider server but paradoxically as a seller I prefer the same site option. Anyone else?
As a buyer, I have no problem with going on to the payment provider server but paradoxically as a seller I prefer the same site option. Anyone else?
I agree... I feel that way to. So do you know of any good shopping cart systems that can be implemented on the same site?
My advantages for a hosted system:
1. I have "Less" headaches as far as a "buggy" cart code/script.
2. I can (if I choose) tell my customers, that their credit card information is collected by a professional service and I never have to see, store or maintain their critical information.
3. My hosted cart costs me $19.00 a month, (hosted, bought, or free you still have your merchant/gateway fees) kinda cheap for this one man operation with about 100 line items of inventory. I don't have the time or energy to chase cart problems that I wouldn't know how to "fix" if I was able to find the problems.
4. The less time I spend fixing software code problems, the more time I have running my business. This for me is a better return for my money.
If and when my operation gets big enough for me to have my own IT department, or my inventory gets to large for a hosted cart, I will look at buying a custom cart.
I hope I don't get in trouble with the TOS here, but it seems OK to name the different carts as everyone else does. My hosted cart decision came down to Volusion and Securenetshop. Do your own research and decide.
I am new at this WWW ecommerce; but I do have over 30 years experience in computer hardware business, so take my "advise" as what I have done and for the reasons I have stated. Analyze and make your decision based on what is best for you depending on the situation you are in now.
Be flexible and ALWAYS position yourself to where you can jump ship and change things with the least amount of pain/expense.
I have no problem with going on to the payment provider server but paradoxically as a seller I prefer the same site option. Anyone else?
This says you're serious about your biz and stand behind it by investing what is needed to make your customers feel secure (well, that's part of the equation anyway.) Every customer I work with and my own projects host all their own stuff. As a programmer of course all my carts are on the secure server, for which we maintain a cert directly on the site.
You don't have to leave a site to use an external payment gateway. If you have a secure server certificate on your site, what you do is what's often called a "silent post." Using curl or some other program you post data to the server just as if you'd submitted a form on that external server, read in the response, and return a response to the user and they literally have never left your site. While this can be done on a non-secure server, all the gateways will only accept a post via a secure connection.
I'll often run through a dummy order and abandon to see how the checkout sizes up.
When you get set up let us know, I hope your customers drive you as crazy as you do us with this. :-)
