sales form
- Hello,
I have a potential client that wants to sell products on his site. The products will not change very often. I have never implemented a sales form on my own site. I dont want to accept credit cards on the site because I would have to maintain an Internet security policy and other things to comply with Visa's requirements.
So here is what I want to do, find a merchant services that offers a customizable sales form. One that allows me to list the products, calculate, the sales total, and shipping. I want the service to host the form on their site accessable via a link from my client's web site.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I am quite effiecient and experienced at site design but not very familiar with e-commerce and need help asap.
Thanks so much in advance,
Sam
All Replies
- You probably won't find what you want. The best you can do, with your spec, is use a hosted shopping cart like Volusion . The other option is to create the form, product listing and ordering process on your clients website and use PayPal as the payment gateway. You can use the PayPal API to track the status of the payment. This method means you won't be taking credit card, or personal information, on your clients website and its can run without an SSL cert as everything is handled by PayPal. Only thing your doing on your clients website is building the shopping cart and total to pay.
To be honest I think this will be over your head (your own words about your experience) and you should be honest with your client about your limitations. Too many people do do right by their clients attempting things that back the client into a deep corner and ecommerce is not a basic-level website feature.
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Chris Hanscom - Microsoft MVP
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Get a Complete Website Analysis by Veign - I don't think that "sales form" is what you mean--it doesn't make sense to me the way you describe it.
It sounds as though what you want is a shopping cart/store front. there are many free shopping carts on the web--zencart and Magento, to name just two.
Or you might use Yahoo Small Business or one of the other storefronts. They handle all of the sales processing for the site, too. - Problem with the Zen Cart or Magento is the need for a PCI compliant server, if Credit Card will be accepted/stored. The OP doesn't want this. This limits the options.
Yahoo Small Business might be a great solution. I think its very similar to Volusion.
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Chris Hanscom - Microsoft MVP
On Facebook | On Twitter | Resource Center | Veign's Blog | Web Development Help
Get a Complete Website Analysis by Veign - Thanks, Chris, I forgot about him not wanting to handle payments while I was trying to parse what he meant by form.
I think PayPal is a fine solution for payment processing, I use it for a number of clients, but I was still stymied by the use of form in relation to it. That's why I didn't mention it.
I've never used Volusion...think I'll go check them out. - Thanks so much for the replies. So, one solution is to purchase shopping cart software and place the shopping cart on my clients site. The shopping cart allows the customers to select the products then when it is time to pay the total is then submitted through the API to the credit card processor, once on the processor's PCI compliant site the customer enters their private information (thus reducing my client's liability).
The other option may be to use an a shopping cart host and payment services. Where the client's site that I am building will be a stand alone. When the customer clicks on shop they would be transferring to the site that host the cart and handles the card processing.
Do I have this right? If so, which is the most economical means?
My client already has a merchant services account. - http://businesscatalyst.com/ is the best hosted ecommerce solution I've seen. Adobe now owns them so you have some assurance they will be around.
MS MVP Expression Tutorials & Help http://by-expression.com and online instructor led Expression Classes Cheryl,
I am using Expression Studio as my main design tool. I am assuming I would have to purchase Dreamweaver to be able to do design changes with businesscatalyst. Is this correct? Other than just logging in and doing direct HTML/CSS authoring.
Thanks,
Sam- It depends. This is your job, based on all the knowledge you have of the clients specification (which we don't have), to choose a solution which best meets their needs.
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Chris Hanscom - Microsoft MVP
On Facebook | On Twitter | Resource Center | Veign's Blog | Web Development Help
Get a Complete Website Analysis by Veign - I don't think Dreamweaver is required to use Biocatalyst but I haven't had any reason to use it since Adobe bought at so suggest you investigate for yourself.
MS MVP Expression Tutorials & Help http://by-expression.com and online instructor led Expression Classes - sounds like mals e cart will be worth looking at . all you put on your site is a "buy now" button and then all calcuations , shipping etc are done for you. Can also configure payments with paypal etc or if the client accepts credit cards then cart will store information to be retrieved by client etc
