Help with shopping cart choice - please

Started by kerensky, January 07, 2013, 12:53:25 PM

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kerensky

Hello all, Can you please give me some advice regarding possible shopping cart choices for my website. ;D

So far,  I have a website, but no cart in place ( don't ask).....  :-\

It has been suggested to me that I use Sagepay, but I know nothing about this or indeed any other web payment system, and after taking a look over the last few days I am still none the wiser!

I don't have a business bank account, and am wondering if I need to set one of these up?  as I want to be able to take card machine payments in the future too.

Not wanting to get "done like a kipper" in terms of merchant payments / web shopping carts and banking fees etc, I thought I would pose these questions to the forum.

Many thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer me.


Kerensky

garishglobes

Sagepay isn't a shopping cart as such, it is a payment processor - and you would need a business bank account. If this is for a relatively small website, I'd say that this would probably be over the top at the moment. I think it is really quite possible that the card machine payment market will change/move forward quite a lot this year and while you may need to provide all sorts of information to show that you are the real deal, it is possible that having a business bank account won't be a necessity. I might be wrong, though.
Sagepay are ok if you are planning on a reasonable turnover - otherwise, would you be better sticking with Paypal?

As far as shopping carts go, how familiar are you with servers and a bit of light coding? After a bit of an initial learning curve, I'm becoming a fan of Prestashop but you would need to be happy with installing it.

June

I've got the free version of Ecwid with my wordpress site, but you can only have up to 100 items. You can upgrade this for a fee for better options and more items. It took a few minutes of mucking about to get it up and running, but is ok to use (and I know nothing about this sort of stuff)!!  :)

arachnia

I have shopp for my wordpress site. I love it
Vickie
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kerensky

I have someone to code it for me, but it looks as if I am going to have to read a bit of blurb so that I fully understand what I actually need.

I have a paypal account, but my understanding is that this interface is not right for my site as I don't want clients to be taken elsewhere to make a payment, I want it all to be integrated, and I think that this is where something like Sagepay comes in, or something similar for smaller businesses.

Believe it or not, the penny is beginning to drop.....pours a glass of wine.....

To me,  it would make sense to have a payment system that offered online card payments, and also card machine functionality, all under one umbrella. Perhaps this is not competitive though?

I suppose I am just looking for a simple straight forward option to it all....

Am off to check out all of the above - both yours and mine, with my glass of wine of course.

Many thanks to you all.

Kerensky.

DragonBright

I'm guessing you've probably sorted this by now, but there are some excellent open source (i.e. free) webfront systems out there.  The most commonly used ones appear to be osCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com/) and OpenCart (http://www.opencart.com), but there's a quite good comparison here: http://www.webappers.com/2010/07/09/15-best-free-open-source-ecommerce-platforms/.  My personal choice is OpenCart.  For most of these solutions, you will need web-hosting, but if you already have a website, then you've got that bit sorted. 

Regarding payment, most of the store systems already support Paypal, so that's probably your best bet to start with.  You will need a bank account to get much use out of a business account, but this is a fairly painless process - HSBC are pretty good, for what it's worth.  The standard (no monthly charge) Paypal solution involves your customers browsing round your site, adding things to a cart, then going to Paypal to make the payment (and being automatically redirected back to your site afterwards) - they don't need a Paypal account for this.  For an additional £20/month, Paypal will allow you to embed the processing into your site, so the Paypal stuff happens behind the scenes, and they never leave your site.

If you already have a business bank account (i.e. a current account for businesses), your bank probably offers merchant facilities as well.  These will generally be cheaper than Paypal et al, assuming you have a basic level of traffic, and they aren't that difficult to integrate into a web storefront.  A lot of the common ones will already be supported by the popular systems anyway, so it's just a matter of fill-in-the-blanks.

Let me know if you have any specific questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Alison
DragonBright: quality tools and accessories for craftspeople - visit us at www.dragonbright.co.uk.

gemkist

Never spend money unless you have to is my motto. I started with free Mal's shopping cart system and it did me proud for years. I can't recommend it enough. You simply integrate it with your paypal account. It really is well explained and there is good forum help.

I only moved from it when I wanted inventory control and to show website prices in a range of different currencies for international customers.