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Please recommend a good "shopping cart" website widget

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superboyac:
I'm looking for a shopping cart widget that can plug into a small business website I'm working on.  Can any of you recommend one?

The website is being deisgned using squarespace.com's design tools.  But they don't have a payment widget.  I'm looking for something that can process al the major credit cards and paypal, and maybe amazon and whatever else.  I don't know how all of this works.  I'm hoping that I can find something to just plug into the website and use easily.

Thanks.

superboyac:
So this is very interesting.  There's a lot more involved here than I initially anticipated.

First thing I noticed is that a lot of website design places offer complete website e-commerce solutions.  One of the heavy hitters out there seems to be BigCommerce.  So most of these places offer just about every feature you can imagine.  EXPECT for the full payment processing services INCLUDING major credit cards.

So, of course, I began to wonder what makes the credit card thing such an obstacle.  The reason why is because that's an arrangement I would have to make with the credit card companies.  Meaning, I need to set up accounts with them and the method with which I'm going to use them to process payments.  So it's hard for the website development companies to just have a ready-made module in place to handle all the payment processing.  It would mean they'd have some cooperative agreement in place with all the credit card companies, which I don't see happening.

Anyway, so I'm trying to find the best combo of website design PLUS payment processing that is the EASIEST and the least amount of useless monthly fees.  The monthly fees I am willing to shell out for are the payment processing with the credit card companies, and the hosting of the website and bandwidth.  I DON'T want to pay monthly for what simply amounts to be a one-time simple website design.  I consider that to be independent of hosting.  The only thing I'm worried about is that nothing exists that is easy and a one time fee.  So the compromise will be that I'll pay monthly fees for things that I don't consider to be monthly services, but at least it will be super easy.

Those are my thoughts so far.

Stoic Joker:
Now here's a boat we're both in. One of my projects at the office is to revamp our company website which also involves getting and setting up a shopping cart. The project was going fairly well right up until it completely hit the wall with regard to the (Comersus) shopping cart I'd been planning to use.

(In a nut shell) Use of a CC gateway exists as a sudo insurance policy against taking the hit for fraudulent charges. In today's world it just has to be done because there is no safe way to deal with customer CC info by yourself. Best option to start with (oddly enough) is your bank. The fees aren't always the lowest, but the money is deposited directly into your account instead of having to wait for third party X to do yet another transfer (usually involving yet another transaction fee) in their own sweet time. Also your bank will (may) have a group of carts that they recommend which gives you a place to start looking.

Most carts are template driven (slap on your sites header and footer and you're golden), so just pick one you like and play with it for a bit to make sure it does what you need it to do. The tricky part is how well does it handle transaction for the types of stuff that you sell. This is the key question I ran into just moments before the project went completely to shit. :)

The cart should have the option to tie into UPS/FedEx/etc. to calculate shipping charges on the fly. These are generally based on package size and weight. Weight is/was easy and worked perfectly the first time. Size on the other hand (with the Comersus cart) completely killed the project because it wasn't handled in a fashion that allowed for the fact that a single shipment could actually be broken up into multiple boxes. Hence the length (width, height) of all items was getting totaled into one massive box that (quickly exceeded 9') would never fit into the shippers truck...Instead of allowing for the fact that putting them in separate smaller boxes (actual max length 22") would easily allow the entire order to fit in a compact car.

Make sure the cart is written in a language you like to deal with ... Because if it ain't you'll start hating yourself in short order which is the mistake I made going with Comersus which is written in .asp. I originally thought it would be fun to learn ASP on the fly - Which (in retrospect) was one of the stupidest ideas I've ever had. I'm currently looking for something in a full service shopping cart written in PHP ... But haven't had time to start testing anything specific.

Carol Haynes:
Depending on what you are selling there are various options with PayPal - which provides many payment options with no monthly charge at all - just 3% per transaction plus a flat rate transaction charge (30p in the UK).

If you are selling things one at a time (ie. you don't need a multiple object cart) just add a PayPal button to each product page. PayPal will let buyers use any credit card (without needing a PayPal account) as well as PayPal payments.

If you want a full shopping cart system there are a few standalone carts out there such as ZenCart and osCommerce. Both are free and support PayPal payments (with non-Paypal user credit/debit card processing) but I have to say they are both beasts to tailor.

Personally I quite like VirtueMart (which is a component for Joomla based sites). Free with lots of payment options and shipping options but you do have to be using Joomla to use it (though there is no reason why you couldn't set up a Joomla subsite and tailor the Joomla template to fit in with the main site).

(PS all of these are PHP/MySQL based.)

nudone:
I'll say what i don't recommend: Interspire shopping cart.

To say that it's meant to be a premium product there are some fundamental things missing in the backend - which I discovered when it was too late.

e.g. add a new attribute to a specific product - oh dear, all your previous attributes across similar products are now deleted. Please manually enter all these attributes all over again. Maybe this bug/feature has been resolved - I just don't understand how such a cart could have been designed with such fundamental things not working.

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