I have a website that I’d like to use to sell things. What are my options for having potential customers purchase items?
I’m talking about how financing can change hands from buyer to seller. My webhosting offers it for $39.95 but, I’m not in a position to take that route as of yet. Anything free of cost that works the same sort of way.
What’s the deal with PayPal.
I’d like to give the customer the ability to pay online instead of having to deal with sending checks and waiting for them to clear.
Paypal’s pretty good. I haven’t had any problems with it, although I have heard other people mention security issues. If you aren’t looking at large amounts, and watch out for the latest round of dodgy emails it might be what you are looking for.
Basically the account is free, but they take a cut of the sale price, which is cheaper than most of the other ways we’ve looked at to deal with credit cards online. Customers don’t have to have a paypal account to purchase, they can use their credit cards. It can also take various different currencies.
Technically, you add buttons to your website, which Paypal generates for you (the HTML is pretty basic, and easily amended if you want to change prices etc. I’ve tied it into ASP with no trouble). The customer clicks the buttons to add items to their cart (stored on the Paypal site), then when they’ve finished, clicks the “View Cart” button which takes them to the Paypal site to complete their order. When they place an order you get an email with the details.
There, more than you ever wanted to know about Paypal.
I’ve looked into this sort of thing for one of my clients, and PayPal is a good route to go if you’r enot looking for a monthly payment committment. Getting a cut taken out of each sale is much easier than paying $40/mo (which is th egoing rate for mos tmerchant account, plus they take a cut as well) if you don’t plan on selling too much.
You can also look at Yahoo’s store plan, that’s quite popular. It must be well done, too because I get alot of hits for yahoo stores on Froogle.
Paypal is definitely the cheapest and easiest. It has some API stuff (that returns info for you to use in your own way) if you want to get into it. Not the most professional thing to use but it’s fine for a small site or a start-up.