Basic transaction page

Hello friends,

I’ve done a basic web site for a client and now the client wants to sell the product online.

I just need to set up a transaction from an order button on a simple HTML site [ I guess like what paypal does - redirects to their basic transaction page ]. It needs to direct to a basic transaction process. I’m aware of shopify and bigCommerce but I don’t need a website, just the transaction steps.

I hope I’ve explained this correctly?

Thank you.
Ross

So why not PayPal?

As long as the client wants to use PayPal then I guess that could work. I guess the only limitation using PP the customer needs to have a PP account.

They don’t, actually. You just need a credit card to buy via PayPal. Having an account is optional.

There are lots of different cart options, so which you choose depends a lot on the need. There are carts that you build into your own site, but then you need an SSL cert etc. which can get a bit heavy duty. Or, as you note, there are third party carts, where the whole site is hosted by that third party. Then there are other like PayPal, where the buy now buttons are on your own site but the payment process is handled by a third party. These are my favorite. I’ve used a few, like Foxy Cart and FastSpring, but there are lots more. If the client is selling not too many products, my current favorite is GumRoad. It’s simple, works really well and looks great, and you don’t need rotten middle men like gateways and merchant accounts, which is great.

You also need to check which market you are targeting and the overall transaction costs. Though paypal is great I am not sure if they support the new Verified by Visa / MasterCard SecureCode which is slowly made mandatory in a few countries but as of date if I am not wrong institutions like Paypal / Amazon etc are not supporting that. Skrill supports this so not sure which market you primarily plan to target and based on that you could consider various options

I think its really important to consider upfront what the typical value of the products your client is selling and what monthly sales they are projecting as part of your choice of shopping cart and payment providers. This is important because PayPal has higher transaction fees so if they have high ticket items or are project lots of sales it is going to end up generating lots of fees. In this case you’ll be better of adding a hosted shopping cart into their site that can take payments through the likes of Authorize.Net for instance which although has a monthly fee will have a lower per-transaction charge so over all your client will could save hundreds of bucks in charges!