Shopping Cart Services...who's best? | WPDFD.com Forums

Dzblack said:

02/14/04, 045 22 2004 2004:%i:1076768540 09:22:20

Which shopping cart service is best? Is Pay Pal ok? Any thoughts about Digital River or any other shopping cart service?

Pay Pal is an EBay company. Against that, it could be argued that they are the most visible shopping cart service on the web today. They might not be the best but because of their visibility, Pay Pal might be the preferred service.

We are looking for opinions from those with experience in choosing and setting up shopping carts.

Joe Gillespie said:

02/15/04, 046 48 2004 2004:%i:1076867314 12:48:34

Dave, I use PayPal and Kagi to sell my fonts. I think it comes down to what you are selling and for how much. I see PayPal as something people use for very small amounts of money. It has serious limitations for me as they don't handle sales tax automatically for EU residents. Might not be a problem for you though.

Kagi is a slighly different proposition. They act as a store and sell you products for you for a small fee. This costs slighly more than Paypal but there are loads of benefits. They handle all the taxes worldwide. Kagi are not without problems (on the technical side) though and I have investigated all the other systems but can't find one that's perfect.

I've looked at Digital River and they charge a higher markup and their cart setup is way too complicated for me. I've also had problems when I've been buying stuff from them, which puts me off.

The other one that people recommend is http://www.swreg.org/. I've looked at them too but their system is not so suited to my particular requirements as Kagi.

All said and done, I would recommend Kagi. They can handle downloads or physical goods, take credit cards or checks. You can use their (fairly simple) order page setup or hook-in your own.

Lozit said:

02/16/04, 047 33 2004 2004:%i:1076934795 07:33:15

You can look here :
http://www.2checkout.com/

i never used it yet myself, but i have some good feedback from friends who are using it.

Jdenny said:

02/16/04, 047 30 2004 2004:%i:1076952613 12:30:13

I have a problem with using pre-made sites.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the shopping cart and/or payment gateway systems provide simple request-responce script facility so that I can simple have, in my code, something like: require 'http://www.payment_gateway.com/functions.php?user=JDENNY&pass=MYPASS';
then be able to validate credit cards and send actual transaction requests using the functions included in the functions.php from the payment gatewat people I am registered with?

I suppose what I'm asking is, how do you actually impliment the system once you've signed up? (I'm not worried about lack of instructions from them, I'm worried about how flexible and integratible it can be)?

Mrblack said:

02/19/04, 050 52 2004 2004:%i:1077202339 09:52:19

I've used pay-pal in the past for small-scale sites and systems where you don't want the complexity of getting a bank involved. I have to say that, from a developers perspective, they do an amazing job at giving you the tools to "code around" them using almost any platform you want, and it's all free (if you don't count the per-transaction hits).

For something more professional, I've gone with what used to be Cybercash but I think is now owned by Verisign. The tools are rather low-level, and it requires you to have a merchant account, but the level of logging, auditing, etc is much greater and the ability to give your customers a seamless transaction is much higher than any of the "canned" solutions.

Jdenny said:

02/20/04, 051 41 2004 2004:%i:1077306107 14:41:47

Do you have a link to the verisign/cybercash one?

I just want some basic functions to add to my existing site/code, I don't want to use those 'canned' types where you basically have a visual interface to a content management system.

Mrblack said:

02/25/04, 056 08 2004 2004:%i:1077743288 16:08:08

This is probably what you're looking for:

http://www.verisign.com/products/payflow/link/index.html

I used this for a charity website and using asp.net it was very easy to get the cart up and running.

Jdenny said:

02/26/04, 057 36 2004 2004:%i:1077835002 17:36:42

Thanks it looks like they have some flexible options, and they are a well-known name too!

Vladimir said:

04/25/04, 116 26 2004 2004:%i:1082946418 22:26:58

I found one that looked good at http://www.storefront.net

I also looked into the PayPal shopping cart and so far it seems good and best of all it's FREE! :o

Idealist705 said:

08/23/04, 236 33 2004 2004:%i:1093275182 11:33:02

StoreFront is a good investement if you have very high needs from your shopping cart service... However, if you don't have time to sit down and go through thousands of options you may consider a simpler and probably less expensive solution.

John2004 said:

10/11/04, 285 38 2004 2004:%i:1097534314 18:38:34

You can also try ExtCart Shopping Cart Software - fully customizable, easy-to-use, upgradeable ecommerce shopping cart system for small and medium-sized businesses. Source codes provided.

John

Jon Jacksan said:

03/20/09, 079 38 2009 2009:%i:1237541931 05:38:51

Try www.zeuscart.com! Beside all other features this software is based on PHP Smarty templates, this makes it very flexible, seo friendly and easy to modify.

Jonny Jacker said:

08/13/09, 225 14 2009 2009:%i:1250165662 08:14:22

Nice post , thank you for sharing .........

Thanks
Loyalty Programs

Mark Webb said:

08/20/09, 232 57 2009 2009:%i:1250798227 15:57:07

I use PayPal for small sites and I am very happy with it. For larger more compex sites you may have at look at Verisign's solutions.

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Oribium Webbyrå - a small business web design service helping small business with consulting in programming, design and creation of websites and web applications.

Richard Robbins said:

09/01/09, 244 38 2009 2009:%i:1251826725 13:38:45

For shopping carts software, you can't go wrong with Zen Cart or Magento. I've used both of them. They're free, and they're not too difficult to customize. They integrate well with most payment processing solutions - credit card, PayPal, etc.

For merchant services, in the US, you can get a merchant account through Costco. The company Costco partnered with is called Elavon, and their discount rate is very competitive. I used them for an online retail business I recently sold.

I'm now using PayPal to process orders for my new website templates development business. PayPal has a generally higher discount rate.

One important note to consider when processing payment is that when you have to refund a customer, PayPal also refunds the original transaction fees, whereas merchant accounts processing Visa and MasterCard payments DO NOT refund the original transactions fees. If you expect to have a significant number of refunds, especially for high dollar amount charges, use PayPal or something similar.