I'm thinking about setting up a website to sell sewing/embroidery items. I'm looking at Paypal's merchant tools. I know a lot of you have your own websites and wondered if Paypal is the way you accept payments. The info on their site sounds good, but then I've read some negative things on the paypalsucks website. Someone said that Paypal has changed for the better since Ebay bought them. Please give me your input and thanks in advance.

jmho--

I've never had anything negative happen with PayPal (knocking wood here, LOL, don't wanna jinx myself) and I've had my account for over 6 years.

As far as what you'll want for your ecommerce solution, that depends on what you really need.

You can use PayPal's free shopping cart tools or you can use another cart (such as Mal's E) and have PayPal as a payment option (other carts can send your customers to PayPal to complete checkout if they want to pay that way).

If you'll need inventory control (i.e. have limited quanities in stock and want the site to keep track/prevent over-selling) then you'll definitely need more than just PayPal's cart stuff--you can use Mal's with a third-party catalog or one of many other carts or services that are available. (I can post some links/reviews if you want that info.)

hth!

when I was selling items on my website.

There IS a way to build a cart so that you only sell what you have.

It just takes fiddling around to figure it out.

I think it is a good first step to take.

You can do a more intricate shopping cart once your biz starts to take off if you want. (one that takes cc directly and so on)

Have fun!

Thanks for any information. Suggestions and links would be really great!

Originally posted by freedomlover
when I was selling items on my website.

There IS a way to build a cart so that you only sell what you have.

It just takes fiddling around to figure it out.



Really? Just using PP's cart stuff? I need to do more fiddling, then. :) Could never figure that out on that one!

Originally posted by Clardy Pearl
Thanks for any information. Suggestions and links would be really great!

For a while I used OptionCart with Mal's E-Commerce. OptionCart is the catalog/inventory manager and Mal's is the cart. I liked it, but it doesn't work as well if you have limited quantities and might make sales really close together. It once oversold some items multiple times when there was a call routine glitch or some such disaster. Maybe they've improved the issue--I know they were working on it--it was only a problem when I posted that I was blowing out my stuff at cost (the only time I got so many sales so close together!). It costs about $60 one-time plus whatever hosting you're doing. (I used RTS for $8/mo.)

Mal's E -- you can use it alone and it's a decent cart. No inventory control on it without an outside module or service. It's free or $6/mo, depending on plan.

WAHMShoppes - I'm with them at the moment (bought a site already hosted there) for the second time in 2 years. I'm leaving as soon as I can, again. I know a lot of people like this one, but the customer communication is very poor and I can't deal with that. (Just a personal thing for me.) It is nice for people who don't wish to/can't actually make a site--you can use canned themes and get up and running quickly. $7/mo

There's another called Total Realm that's very affordable and has a couple options for carts incl. one with inventory control. I contacted them and would like to go with them myself, in the future, if I don't buy my own cart. A friend recommended it and she seems happy with it. (Hi! :) ) $10/mo plus possibly a set-up fee

More expensive and more rigid in how your site might look, there's MonsterCommerce and GoECart. Yahoo hosts stores for a reasonable monthly fee (think it's $40/mo). Another I like is 3DCart. It's very customizable and flexible. $70/mo +

There are also many carts you can buy a license for around $200 or less--instead of using a cart through a hosting service...X-Cart and Click Cart Pro come to mind and you then own the license, can host whereever you want, etc.

And Readyhosting ($99-$199/year) has hosting and you get to use a cart for free (Cart32). Same with PageZone ($5+/mo.)--they have free carts available. (I host 5 domains with Page-Zone and 4 with Readyhosting and the uptime is very close to 100% on both.)

I've been hacked on Readyhosting and RTS--both times they restored everything within hours. (Server security issues!)

Hth! :D

Wow! Thanks for all the information!