Hoping someone can point me in the right direction here. A client who sells vitamin supplements wants an online store. I've been doing research for hours on shopping carts, merchant accounts, payment gateways, etc. and my head is swimming.

I was going to steer her in the direction of letting me build a website and then using PayPal for the shopping cart because it's sooo easy and cheap compared to my trying to learn all of the above topics. My research into PayPal's system leads me to believe that I can just create a site and create ADD TO CART buttons for each product and the customer can pay either with PayPal or a credit or debit card. There are no monthly charges for the basic version. If she needs discount/coupon ability, we'll have to use the Pro version for $30 per month.

But now I'm thinking maybe an online store would be easier since designing a site from scratch would take longer and cost her more in labor charges since I don't have a template for a store. I need a free online store that works well. Can anyone recommend one? Has anyone tried one?

Preliminary research yielded these results: Vendio, FreeWebStore, Big Commerce, etc. but since there's no phone support for these, I'm leery. I know the client won't want to pay very much per month, so is there a nearly free one you can recommend?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

zippy

You may want to look at Zen-Cart. It is a free shopping cart and I had a past client that used them to sell supplements. I believe it is simple to use once set up.

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Lee Drozak
My Office Assistant

Thanks. ZenCart is one of the shopping carts that will work with her webhost. But wouldn't I still need to set up a merchant account, payment gateway, etc? Those will cost her a hefty monthly fee and will take time for me to learn. I was hoping to set her up with a free online store and use PayPal as the shopping cart so it's simple and cheap. Would that work?

I think I found my answer ... I just discovered this page https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?c...ts_wp_standard which tells me all the shopping carts that are configured for PayPal. I'll either just use one of those and build her a site OR use Vendio or another online store that's configured for PayPal if she'd rather pay a commission percentage per item rather than a monthly website hosting fee.

What do you guys think?

I have used ZenCart for a client before, instalation and set up was fairly easy. I also maintain a site that uses Shopp, I didn't install this one but setting up and maintaining it isn't difficult. The client doesn't have a site? I think a site with a shop/store would be best- it would give the client the chance to share more information on products, sales, company, ect.

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Amy
www.porterofficesolutions.com

Another option is a service called Shopify. You can design a site using templates available and then the payment solutions can be linked to Paypal or Google Checkout. You can add images of products, descriptions, etc. It's very user friendly too.

Shopify: http://www.shopify.com/

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Darlene Victoria Gonzalez
The Voice & Vision Behind Your Business

A new one that integrates nicely with Paypal is called Cashie - http://www.cashie.biz/. What's interesting about it is you don't have to pay anything until someone buys something from you and it looked like the set up was pretty easy.

I was playing around with it and got the hang of it pretty quick.

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Renee Shupe, Become a Techie Virtual Assistant
eMail Marketing & Aweber Training Starts May 15! - Save 50% using VAFAweber

In terms of merchant account or Paypal/Google Checkout, it depends on what volume your client is going to have at the store. Does she already have a fairly large client base that she will migrate to the site or is she a "start-up"? The volume should dictate whether you choose a merchant account. There is an upfront fee usually for the merchant account set up and a monthly payment. Some of them even have a minimum of the monthly payment amount in fees or they will charge you that in addition to the monthly fee. You have to do your research. I would make sure you know what your client wants not what is easiest. Let me explain why. If you set her up on Paypal and her volume is moderately high, she may then want you to come back and set up the merchant account and if your site template is not integrated with a shopping cart, you will a lot more work to do than if you started the site with an e-commerce site and the payment method she needs. Just my thoughts on it...

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www.marlexsolutions.com

Great points, mjescobar. I would be using Vendio if it were just a simple stand-alone online store or if the client has a website, then a shopping cart supported by their webhosting company. My cart of choice if I use my favorite hosting company would be CubeCart or ZenCart. If I understand correctly, those will both work with PayPal and/or a merchant account & payment gateway. So I'm thinking I'll just set up one of those carts so that they can use either system. If they want to start with PayPal, later it could be switched to a merchant account. Or if they already had a hosting company, I'd pick one of the supported carts that also had the PayPal and merchant account capabilities.

Please let me know if I'm understanding this in the right way, if this is a good solution.

Thanks!