Voting Chart

March 25th, 2004, 1:25 pm

i'm not sure if i should go with paypal as my online shopping cart service, or if i should buy a shopping cart software and implement it myself on ouir server. which do people feel more at home with when they buy online?

March 25th, 2004, 1:37 pm

I think it depends on the store and its intended customer base.

For a small 'hobbyist' store, where it's just a spare time personal project, I think a PayPal cart can work just great.

But on a site where the pure inention is to make money, and it's your primary source of income, a PayPal cart can look very unprofessional.

Personally, if it was a site that was intended to make money, I would go with a shopping cart system.

Further to that, I'd use osCommerce. It has its own cart & store, however you can still use PayPal to check out and pay (as well as giving them other options, COD, send a cheque, credit card, etc.). Best of all, it's free to download

http://www.oscommerce.com

March 25th, 2004, 1:42 pm

I use PayPal for several reasons:

1. No set-up fees (has per-order fees)
2. It's trusted
3. You don't need to get into paying for certificates to make sure that people trust you.

But as Axe said:

Quote:

pure inention is to make money, and it's your primary source of income, a PayPal cart can look very unprofessional.

But untill you are a bug company, my advice is to use PayPal.

March 25th, 2004, 1:48 pm

i'll check that site out and see what's up. so far we have used ccnow as our processor, which is kind of like paypal in that they host all the payment optons and the cart page. the bad part is, when you hit "continue shopping" it brings you back to our site, but it adds the ccnow banner accross the entire top of the site, pushing everything down and sideshowing our customers into buying from other stores in the "ccnow mall" or everyone else who is too lazy to hook up their own shopping cart. paypal is the better of those two, but i think i'll take your advice and get the real software. we already have a paymen gateway set up anyway.
thanks for the help!
our site is http://www.nuflo.com if anyone wants to take a peek at some independent brooklyn street wear.

March 30th, 2004, 7:27 am

hi.

ok, this is really nothing to do with whether or not it is a better option to include it in your site but I shy away from using Paypal as a customer as I once payed for something using paypal, then discovered the seller didn't accept paypal and paid by cheque. Ages later, I discovered that Paypal had nonetheless taken the £50 from my credit card and I had effectively paid £100 for a £50 item. As I never use my credit card for other things and hadn't bought anything else online since then, I hadn't even checked the balance (online only credit card) so it was a year down the line that I spotted it.

March 30th, 2004, 9:43 am

If you paid for something using PayPal, and it turned out the E-Mail address you sent it to didn't have a PayPal account, you can click a link to cancel the transaction.

Personally, I've sent and received thousands of dollars through PayPal over the last couple of years. I use it at least once or twice a week, and I've never had a single problem myself.