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Technical Forum => Website issues => Topic started by: kerensky on January 07, 2013, 12:53:25 PM

Title: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: kerensky on January 07, 2013, 12:53:25 PM
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
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: garishglobes on January 07, 2013, 04:16:07 PM
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.
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: June on January 07, 2013, 04:25:19 PM
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)!!  :)
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: arachnia on January 07, 2013, 07:27:16 PM
I have shopp for my wordpress site. I love it
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: kerensky on January 07, 2013, 10:48:29 PM
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.
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: DragonBright on April 24, 2013, 02:59:48 PM
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
Title: Re: Help with shopping cart choice - please
Post by: gemkist on June 05, 2013, 06:16:45 PM
Never spend money unless you have to is my motto. I started with free Mal's shopping cart (http://www.mals-e.com/) 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.