This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Do You Need a Shopping Cart Partner?
When it comes to implementing a shopping cart on your site, you have several options. You can
- Build your own shopping cart from scratch. This is expensive and time consuming, but it provides you with a totally customized solution that exactly matches the look and feel of the rest of your website. Plus, with your own shopping cart, there are no ongoing monthly or usage fees—although you'll still have to pay PayPal or another firm for payment processing.
- Partner with a third-party shopping cart service. These services offer ready-to-run shopping cart/checkout systems that can be somewhat customized in look and feel to match the rest of your website. Integration with your site is less costly and time consuming than building your own system from scratch, although some programming is still necessary. (The integration of the shopping cart with PayPal, however, is typically seamless; it's integrating the cart with your site that takes a bit of effort.) You'll pay a set monthly fee for the use of the shopping cart, a fee per transaction or one based on your transaction volume, and payment processing fees.
- Use the PayPal Shopping Cart. This is the easiest solution to implement. All you have to do is generate and insert Add to Shopping Cart button codes for each SKU on your site; PayPal handles everything else. There's no integration programming necessary (beyond the button codes, of course), and no additional programming needed on your site. You don't even have to pay for this service; the PayPal Shopping Cart has no setup fees and no ongoing monthly fees. (You do have to pay PayPal's normal payment processing fees, of course.) The primary downsides are that you send visitors away from your site for the checkout process and that PayPal's checkout pages aren't as specific to your brand or company as custom-built checkout pages.
Where do you go to implement each of these solutions? It depends on which choices you make.
Building It Yourself
If you want to build it yourself, you'll need to contract with a website development firm—typically the same folks building the rest of your site. Make sure you're dealing with a firm that has experience building e-commerce sites and systems.
Content Management Systems
Most small to medium-sized online businesses do fine with a static website and shopping cart system. But if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs, you may be better off with a more sophisticated content management system (CMS) and product database. This type of system doesn't rely on static product web pages; instead, all product information is stored in a large database, and product pages are generated dynamically when a customer browses to or searches for a particular SKU. You enter information about each product into the database, and that information is then fed into a template used for each product page.
From the customer's viewpoint, a CMS-based site looks identical to a site based on static product pages. The only visible difference is the page URL, which is short and static on a normal site, but is dynamically generated on a CMS site and can be long.
From the merchant's perspective, a CMS-based site is much more difficult to implement, at least initially. It requires quite a bit of initial coding, as well as the creation of a product database. However, many sites on the web are moving to a CMS approach with the popularity of PHP-based open source systems such as Drupal and Joomla, which makes maintaining all pages at your site easier. For e-commerce specifically, ongoing maintenance is lower, as you can add new products (and new product pages) simply by adding more information to the database. Changing the price value in the database means the new price is automatically reflected in all dynamically generated product pages.
In terms of integrating with a shopping cart, there's not much difference between a traditional or CMS-based system. In a traditional system, product and pricing details are hard-coded into the product's payment button; in a CMS system, this information is pulled from the underlying database. But the checkout system works in pretty much the same way in either case, dynamically generating the checkout page and initiating the payment process.
Should you consider a content management system for your e-commerce site? Absolutely. If the learning curve, technology, and setup are too much for you, then you might decide against it, but the rewards will be considerable.
Fortunately, PayPal's Website Payments Pro and Payflow Payment Gateway solutions both integrate well with CMS-based shopping carts.
Finding a Shopping Cart Partner
If you want to go with a third-party shopping cart, there are many firms you can partner with—hundreds of them, in fact. Make sure that the shopping cart you choose integrates with PayPal, of course; in fact, many third-party shopping carts come with PayPal functionality built in.
More specifically, you need to make sure the shopping cart integrates with the PayPal product you've chosen for your business; you still need to choose between Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro, and the other services. Once you've ensured this compatibility, it's a matter of selecting the features, functionality, and price that work best for you.
Where can you find a shopping cart partner? PayPal maintains a list of compatible shopping carts in their Partner Directory. Go to the Solution Types pane and check Shopping Cart; PayPal now displays dozens of shopping cart providers, as you can see in Figure 4.2. You can sort the results by distance, company name, or PayPal partner level (Platinum, Gold, or Member.) Click through to learn more and contact any given company.
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Figure 4.2 Browsing for shopping cart partners in the PayPal Partner Directory.
Selecting the PayPal Shopping Cart
The PayPal Shopping Cart is available with Website Payments Standard. When you sign up for your PayPal account, this is the solution you want to choose.
Once you've signed up, integrating the PayPal Shopping Cart into your site is a simple matter of generating HTML code for an Add to Cart button for each SKU on your site, and then inserting that code into each product page. (Figure 4.3 shows typical results.) You'll also want to generate code for and insert View Cart buttons, so that your customers can check out and pay when they're ready.
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Figure 4.3 PayPal Add to Cart buttons on a typical product page.
Once all the buttons are generated and inserted, and you take your new product pages live, your shopping cart is also live. Since all the processing occurs on PayPal's site, your setup work is now done; any customer who makes a purchase will use the PayPal Shopping Cart.