What's the Easiest Way to Add eCommerce to a Site?

[VisualAudio]

I'd like to add the ability to sell digital files from my website. It currently has no eCommerce features, and has nothing for sale. What is the easiest and least expensive way to offer downloads for sale?

I'm in the USA. I do have a PayPal account. I don't have a merchant account with any of the credit card companies.

I've considered selling through a third party website that takes a percentage of the profits, and just link my website to the external online shop. I'm not sure if that's the best method to get started though. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks!

[lorax]

Hello & welcome to WebmasterWorld!
How many products are you going to sell? My first impulse is to say use PayPal until your sales rise enough to warrant a merchant account and online a gateway processing setup. PayPal is easy to implement too.

[VisualAudio]

I currently have hundreds of stock photos that I'd like to sell online. The collection is also constantly growing. In the very near future, I'd like to add stock audio files. All content is original, and produced by myself. There aren't any copyright infringement issues to worry about. :)

I do realize that there are already some large photo and audio stock marketing sites out there, which will sell copies of my work and take a percentage of the income for themselves. In fact, I'm already contributing to a couple of those.

What I'd like to do, is be able to offer the same types of files on my own websites. I also plan to keep selling images through stock agencies. This would be a supplement to that. This would be just another channel to offer the files to the public. I realize that my site won't get as much traffic as a large stock photo agency, but the advantages would be keeping all of the profits from these sales, and also being able to sell additional material that the stock agency wasn't interested in selling.

My first instinct was to use my PayPal account to receive payments to start with, and not worry with a merchant account--unless the sales volume got really large. We seem to agree on that idea.

Could you please describe a bit more about what you called an "online gateway processing setup"? Maybe you could suggest a few examples of that?

Thanks

[CPC_Andrew]

This is relevant to my interests as well. I'm exploring the idea and have a general notion of where to start, but I'm sure there's a lot of variables I'm ignoring.

[caran1]

If volumes are low, Paypal is the most popular option. Plimus is also used, but their fees are higher for lower priced items.

[Thenatos]

Take a look at foxycart, you can integrate it to anything. You can do seamless with a supported gateway or leverage paypal or google checkout for low volumes.

The other option to consider might be smugmug.com, it's a kickbutt hosted solution for photographers and the pro version handles purchases for print.

IANAL with either, just happy using them both.

[lorax]

online gateway processing setup

Full transaction processing involves a website with a shopping cart, SSL, a transaction processor (aka: gateway) and a merchant bank account. When a buyer checks out in this scenario, the shopping cart submits the CC info to the gateway to be checked. The gateway checks the buyers CC info and if all is good, gives the go ahead to your cart (transaction successful).

The details of what actually happens next depends upon the particulars of your setup (Authorize only or Authorize and Capture).

In an Authorize only setup, the gateway just verifies the info and waits for you to initiate the capture manually. When you do, the gateway takes money from the buyers account and puts it into your merchant account.

In an Authorize and Capture setup, the gateway just goes ahead and runs the card and competes the transaction automatically. The buyer's payment goes directly into your merchant bank account.

I'm leaving out a bunch of details and variations but this is the general process. HTH