What are some of my options for e-commerce?
Below are a few ideas and considerations pertaining to simple e-commerce solutions. There are essentially three components to consider for a proper e-commerce solution:
- A Shopping Cart System
- A Payment Gateway
- A Bank Account (often a Merchant Account)
There are any number of ways to meet these requirements. For example, PayPal provides services 1 and 2, and even sometimes 3. PayPal can handle donations, subscriptions and regular sales. It works well with Ladybug , handles the shopping cart, processes the sale, and can even automatically make the deposits. This is why we often choose PayPal for our simple e-commerce solutions.
From our experience, the main disadvantage to PayPal is primarily that the checkout portion is not very branded, so it is obvious to anyone that you using a PayPal shopping cart when they check out. Not to mention, they’re getting directed to another site. One big win is that you don’t need to worry about much, they’re an end-to-end solution. You just have to worry about keeping your website looking good, and PayPal takes care of the rest.
The most common approach to online sales is to run shopping cart software of your own (number 1 above). What happens is that a web hosting company buys that software, installs it on their web server, and lets their clients use it as their shopping cart. But some of these softwares can be inflexible and awkward, not to mention expensive.
We like to use Magento, an open-source solution that allows us to produce well-designed, functional e-commerce website. We install it on your web server, point it to your Payment Gateway, and off you go. The big difference with this method (versus PayPal, for example) is that typically your whole website “becomes” the shopping cart. That is, every page on your site has a “view my cart” or “checkout” button on it. Your browser remembers that you have stuff in your cart the whole time, and every page on your site is managed by the shopping cart software. This is useful, especially if your website basically is an online store.
