Whilst you’re here, another little tip – be upfront with delivery costs, preferably with a link on your site to precise costings, or if you need to calculate cost for each purchase, then do that calculation in the basket – don’t make people register or log in to see delivery costs. I’ll generally go elsewhere rather than register just to see the total cost to me.

Some great thoughts here…. cheers boys and girls 🙂

To be honest if the shopping cart can’t even handle on line payments through paypal or CC don’t even bother with it. There are loads of carts/e-commerce systems that do already, from free ones to expensive ones. The emailing of a payment link will be a massive turn-off.

Try oscommerce, open source freebie with loads of mods available.

On the Paypal subject – it is becoming more and more acceptable to Joe Public nowadays compared to all the scare stories around 6 or 7 years ago.

We use CC and Paypal processing and percentage of PP has grown over the yeras to approx 25% of total.

The email payment link thing is how a basic PayPal business account works. You send people an email “invoice” and they follow the links to pay via PayPal.

The next step up from that costs a LOT more money (i.e. fully-integrated e-terminal).

We process maybe 20 transactions a year via credit card, so it would be a bit daft to get either a real or a virtual terminal. Generally, people are fine with using the link through system once it’s been explained.

That’s from a small holiday business though, where people have already had a fair bit of dialogue with the owner, not from a “faceless” e-commerce site.

ditto what stevo just said..

I use the paypal invoice email system all the time for All Mountain Venture and no-ones ever had an issue with it. I do give other options to pay but everyone chooses paypal because its secure, free and an easy established method.

I guess its different for me though because like steveo I run a small holiday business and I am always in email/telephone contact with the customer ; when it comes to payment I tell them they are going to receive an invoice from my paypal account with a link to click and pay.

Different if that was automated and came out of the blue, I am not sure it suits your business.

I like Paypal as a payment system but reckon it’s seriously flawed (in their favour of course) for payment receipt. I sell quite a bit of stuff on ebay and this week received cleared payment for some new bike parts so posted them off straight away as always. Goods were signed for this morning but I’ve received an email message from Paypal saying that the payment has been reversed by the buyer’s bank, leaving me with a negative Paypal balance 👿 .

Whilst you’re here, another little tip – be upfront with delivery costs, preferably with a link on your site to precise costings, or if you need to calculate cost for each purchase, then do that calculation in the basket – don’t make people register or log in to see delivery costs.

Yes, yes, oh GOD yes! If I can’t find out how much it’s going to cost in postage before I register, I’m not bothering.

But Paypal is fine as long as you have the option of not needing a paypal account to pay. Which it sounds like you have covered.

Nothing wrong with PayPal itself. Plenty of big companies using it and it’s one of the most secure out there. But I’d suggest getting someone to integrate it into your cart.

Generally, with the smaller eCommerce sites do, is send the customer off to PayPal (or whatever payment solution they’re using), where they make payment securely, and any relevant order info is sent back to your site.

There are simpler ways of doing it, if you want to be really primitive about it, but I do think your idea of the way it will work would put me off. I wouldn’t want to go through all that hassle. Unless it was a hard to come by product that I was prepared to labour over.