Forum Moderators: buckworks
I dont understand the transaction process at all,my host gives a free agora and directs you to itransact or intellipay,but the costs for them are beyond his budget.
How much does paypal take out of the payments?
what would all you guru's suggest?
Paypal is a great solution for small sites, quick fix and or temp shopping cart. Especially for small sites. I have 9 sites using it right now. I am using it as a temporary solution while writing a WYSIWIG / PHP & Static page Hyprid Dreamweaver plugin.
Paypals cart is great for a couple of reasons. First (in your case) it is cheap: $0.30 per transaction and then the C/C companies get their standard 2.2%. If you were using a $25 a month shopping cart solution it would take 80+ sales for the Paypal cart to start costing like a monthly cart. The second good reason (in your case) to use it is that you can put it up, take it done, and change it quickly. The thrid good reason to use it (in your case) would be lots of people are already familair with Paypal and even already have a Paypal account.
The bad.. oh there is always bad.. Paypal will not figure exact shipping charges for you. For this you have to options. One set up a flat shipping rate based on % of sales, for example $5.00 pruchase $1.00 shipping charge. $20.00 purchase $4.00 shipping . You decide what the flate rate will be. Your second option is to bill the customer though a paypal e-mail. There is a plus to all this though. If you figure the shipping correctly it either comes out in the wash or up make money on shipping. Several of the sites I am webmaster of use Paypal are actually making money on the shipping. The last bad thing about the Paypal cart is it is limited on the number of Options you can apply. You get a choice of adding two Drop down menues or text boxes or any combination of the two.
Well I have rambled on enough. If you need any more info on Paypal e-mail me and I will help you out with questions and or the proper coding.
Another option to consider is [netstores.com...] it is about $25 a month and they are very helpful and friendly.
I think they take 1.5% comission or $1.50 (whichever is less) but they do have the option of capturing credit card purchases, but your client would need an offline credit card merchant account.
as visitors to the site increase and you get more products etc, look at other options for shopping carts and payment processors.
