I’m building a site for a friend who wants to sell t-shirts to promote his band. This is my first attempt at selling products online.
Right now there are only 6 shirts and while testing oscommerce that seemed a little much for what I need. I would like a basic cart and I’llbe using paypal express for payment. Do I even need a cart or can I build a nice static page, with a little jquery and then put a paypal button on it.
If I use the paypal button where does the quantity get taken in account, say if a customer wants more than one shirt, different sizes, or more than one style?
Your best bet is going to be a CMS of some sort. While 6 items may not be a lot, you just want cart functionality included in your website. You may eventually want more than just static pages as well such as the ability to interact with fans (or fans to interact with eachother). It is also easier to update content with one or add new content. I’m ever the advocate for Drupal with the ubercart set of ecommerce modules. It can be integrated with paypal and other processors if necessary. While it may seem overkill for you right now, it is easier to expand for the future. There are many who use a CMS even though their site only has a few pages. Its all about anticipating what you might need later to save yourself some trouble. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Well, these aren’t exactly hosting companies in the conventional sense. They are complete online selling solutions that make it very easy to set up an online store. They offer a lot of features that you might not get from installed software and they usually look a lot a better.
Yes, you could create your own HTML pages and insert PayPal Shopping Cart buttons. You also might have a look at the Google Checkout Shopping Cart which is a bit niftier.
I’m not familiar with Drupal, however I am familiar enough with WP to check into it’s e-commerce options. I think I will try that route. Thanks for the information.
check “WP ecommerce” plugin…it is easy to install and has all the features like paypal integration–shipping calculator–Quanity estimated price and all
It’s free for basic features which is all u would need.
Thanks
If you are able to put the HTML web page together yourself, or even if you are using a content management system like WordPress which you mentioned earlier, you could try looking in to using hosted cart store add-in.
These type of hosted cart add-in solutions are similar to the PayPal ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Buy Now’ button approach where you copy and paste the ecommerce buttons in to your website. However, the end result gives you much more of professional feature rich shopping experience for your customers and many more advanced capabilities for you as a merchant, such as the full stock control you were keen on or a greater variety of shipping and delivery plans you could set up.
Some of the hosted shopping cart add-ins also have special ecommerce plugins you can use in conjunction with WordPress which allow you to add the store to your website using the content management system admin dashboard, avoiding copying and pasting code in to your web pages all together.
I too would recommend ubercart since it is based on Drupal CMS. But if you’re not familiar with Drupal and don’t want to become, then yes that’s not a good option. But those who are familiar with Drupal already understand why one wouldn’t want to use another solution than ubercart. It sounds like Apple fanboys, and maybe it is, even if I don’t see it that way, maybe when you’re into something that look great no matter how you look at it, you become blind/deaf to the arguments of others. But to be honest I don’t think I’ve read any arguments against the use of Drupal, only people who say they’re not familiar with it or sya they’ve tried and it’s too complicated for them… Well, I think for your need many cart solutions can work, simply find one to be integrated within your wordpress site… For sure that will take less time for this specific project, but if you invested the time, and took this project opportunity to have a real motivation to learn drupal, then the future would look brighter for any future project you’ll stick to Drupal for sure, now I sound like a Drupal fanboy
For just 6 products Magento is an overkill. Why not to start with your own static page that you can easily style, add PayPal / Google Checkout buttons (via e-junkie for example), and if it picks up and makes sense, move on onto a third-pary cart?
Hi friend
It is batter to use cart for the result u want to achieve. But u can do it by using static page. you have to do more research by visiting more wholesale online portal.You can also get to contact them and helped out.
