Paypal Shopping Cart
The vast majority of small
home based businesses use paypal as the payment system for their
online business. Primarily because it is simple to obtain
compared to the extreme qualifications required by Visa and
Mastercard to get a merchant account. As well as the low overhead
at startup.
That means, you need an e-commerce
solution that supports paypal. Systems like BumbleBee Works and
pageBuzz do just that. The shopping cart which is capable of
managing up to 2500 products allows anyone to set up using paypal
as the payment system in about 1 minute or less.
Paypal is a great option for a
new business but many websites do not have fully integrated
system for the shopping cart. Many use a simple buy now button or
backend using the actual paypal shopping cart.
The disadvantage to that
option is that the user continuosly leave your website with no
way to get back to the online shopping.
More often than not, people
will buy multiple items. If they buy an ipod, they will also buy
batteries or a carry case. If you make that process difficult by
sending the user to an outside website, those multi order sales
are often lost. In many cases the base order is lost because the
user thinks something is wrong. Why are they suddenly at a new
website?
Just because a shopping cart
claims to be paypal compatible, does not tell you how compatible
and how user friendly it is. The b-cart used for many years by
all cyber web hosted websites has been run through the ringer and
developed on an ongoing schedule.
Almost 95% of the users of the
b-cart paypal compatible shopping cart use paypal as the payment
system. The other 5% use a combination of realtime credit card
processing and manual collection of sales orders.
The b-cart is one of the most
popular shopping systems available because it is complete and
offers users friendly shopping and site owners easy product
management.
If you are shopping for a
shopping cart or webstore and you plan to use paypal, it is best
to use a comapny that has already done the hard work for you.
System like yahoo require that
you paste complicated HTML code in each item page to allow the
purchase of the item. If you wanted to learn HTML and CGI you
would not need a shopping cart, you could build it from scratch.
Try to find a shopping system
that is easy o use and provides all the features you need. If the
cart offers an affiliate tracking system and affiliate signups,
do you need it?
Advanced features often mean
big bucks in fees and in 100% of the cases offers features that
will use up more of your time than they can produce in sales.
Our focus is on the actual
tools you need. If you plan to use paypal, you are already trying
to save money and use the easy way out. There is no reason to get
involved with complicated shopping systems that offer tools you
will never use.
Sure it is cool to have live
chat support in the cart. But are you going to be at your
computer 24-7-365 to assist people? Unless you are selling
volumes like walmart, it will take more out of you than you will
get back. If you offer the option and don't respond to a shopper
because you are sleeping or at church, then you lost the
customers confidence. You would not lose the customer if you just
did not have the live support.
It would not make much sense
to use paypal and then build a multimillion dollar website.
Paypal is for the small guys. So choose a system that supports it
in a manner that wont kil your busines model and force you to
learn more than necessary.
Simple isn't always better.
But complicated is never better.
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