Help Need In Replacing Paypal Cart

Replacing Paypal cart

[JohnNg]

I would really appreciate some help with ideas to replace my existing paypal cart.

I have been using the paypal cart for a number of years but have recently wanted a more sophisticated cart. I want to try and do the following with a new cart:

1) Once the customer has added a product to the cart, in the cart itself I want to have a small pic of the product with a link back to the product both on the pic and text.

2) I want to incorporate a trust symbol such as verisign within the cart.

3) I would like to simply replace my existing add to cart codes with the new shopping cart and replace the view cart code with the new view cart code.

4) Once the customer checks out I would like a single page check out option.

5) I would like the customer to be able to view a summary of their cart on every page with the product name, quantity and cost at the top corner of my site.

I've looked at tones of carts and they all seem to be geared towards building a shopping site rather then being a stand alone cart. Many of those that can be used as a stand alone cart either require the existing site to change their pages to php or asp. Some carts can have forms you can use to replace the paypal button with their cart, which is great, but not for the shopping basket (i.e. when someone wants to view their basket from a product page).

I want to keep my site and product pages the way they are in html but replace the cart with a much sophisticated cart, any ideas?

thanks guys in advance

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld JohnHg,
The odds are you have a major overhaul on your hands. You would likely be better off locating a programmer to make the modifications for you rather than trying to find an off the shelf solution because off the shelf solutions will have their own particular process and will likely need to be modified anyhow.

HTH

[pageoneresults]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld JohnHg!

I want to keep my site and product pages the way they are in html but replace the cart with a much sophisticated cart, any ideas?

Years ago, we jumped on the PayPal API bandwagon and haven't looked back since. We just built a custom cart around the PayPal API and to date, nothing compares. We're processing upwards of a thousand transactions each month and have few if any errors. We provide both Credit Card and PayPal checkout. When CC is used, it is still being processed by PayPal, the user just doesn't know it, nor do they care.

I've shopped for off the shelf cart solutions for years. I've purchased more than a handful of software licenses. I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing that compares to building your own, based on your specifications. The long term benefits are far reaching. Many will say it is not worth it. But, if you're in this for the long haul, do it now before you end up in shopping cart hell!

[Luxoria]

Even though I can't really add anything new to this thread I would like to reinforce the above statements.

Why is it important to keep the pages in HTML? Do you have people with a low level of skill edited each page manually? Or do you just really like how your site is and are concerned changing over to a a full blown shopping cart will ruin the look?

The shopping cart osCmax has a 'simple template system' which can be edited on the HTML level for people who do not want to learn PHP. Also this cart has the features you stated you are looking for. A skilled programmer can rework the cart to look identical to your current HTML site, but could be costly.

But also my thinking is if your site has few products and you sales are not too high a HTML site should be fine. Which in turn means less time and money to make a PHP or ASP cart look how you want.




As for suggestions for a solution I have none.

[JohnNg]

Thank you all for your suggestions. It sounds like a custom cart is the way forward and I will have to find a programer to do this.

The main reason I wanted to keep the site in html, is because it is well indexed and ranked by google so am worried about making any changes to the actual format of the page e.g. changing to a php page etc.

thanks for the help.

John

[enigma1]

You can deploy a shopping cart and still keep the exact same links. There are ways to do that regardless of the server. It can be asp, php etc but still links exposed can be html. You could do that theoretically with any application by changing the server configuration adding rules so the old html link is converted into something the shopping cart application understand and consequently processes.

And whether you go with open source or something ready check what plugins are available for friendly urls. They typically have ready modules to do the conversion transparently so you may not have to write or change code.