posted on November 20, 2000 08:00:37 AM
I have a shopping cart, and a merchant account. The shopping cart is actually a "rented" one. I pay 19.95 per month plus 1% of transactions.
I also have a merchant account, where I pay 2.45%, plus .40 per transaction.
Not GREAT, but at least I have seen sales increase quite a bit, AND I have control over the address verification system, unlike paypal.
posted on November 20, 2000 11:25:38 AM
Sure. The cart is creative cart from creativecart.com
But, to accept credit cards, you STILL need a merchant account. This particular shopping cart does not work with my credit card processing gateway. The customer provides all their credit card info on creative cart's secure web server. I have to manually process the credit card transactions, which is fine with me. I prefer that over real time processing anyway.
The shopping cart will still work for COD orders if you do not get a merchant account.
I got my account through heartland payment systems, and my gateway through authorize.net Heartland sets all that up.
If you want to see how the shopping cart works, look at my site:
posted on November 20, 2000 02:03:08 PM
I did pretty extensive research when I decided to build my website. I looked into CCNow's, some outright purchase ones, and some free ones. I finally decided on a "package deal" with Accesspoint called Merchant Manager. The package includes shopping cart, merchant account, ACH checking, site statistics, real-time inventory, and tons more. You can build your own site and integrate the shopping cart or you can "build it in 10 minutes" using their templates software.
One major disadvantage that I found with CCNow's shopping cart, was that you couldn't set it up for customers to pay by check unless you basically built 2 separate sites. That may have changed by now.
My site is set up to let the customer shop, then they decide whether they want to to pay by Check/MO, CC, or Paypal. If they opt for Check/MO, they are emailed an invoice with the mailing address. If they opt for CC, the system goes to a secure site for real-time processing, and if they opt for PayPal, the final page gives them a button that takes them to Paypal and already has the total and my email address filled in.
You can try out Accesspoint's system by going to:
http://www.accesspoint.net/
Click on Merchant Manager at the left, then find the Demo tab at the top. You can try it out for free for 5 days, I think.
I am not affiliated, except a happy customer. We have been with them almost a year.
posted on November 20, 2000 02:08:27 PM
Yahoo! PayDirect offers a "poor man's" shopping cart. It can be used to purchase a single item only. Click on the icon, it takes the customer to PayDirect with the description and amount already filled in. Customer just types in credit card number. Not very functional (because it only processes a single transaction), but it's free.
I'm working on my own page now at www.gratefuldad.com.
