Online Shopping Carts - Need Advice

[sue d.]

Has anyone here had any experiences with shopping carts as a seller - any recommendations or sites to stay away from?

I need some help... fast!

[gman]

Paypal shopping cart was very easy to implement, but limited in what you could do with. It only allowed 2 additonal options per item. I had to do some programming to be able to have more options. It also doesn't integrate with your website. By that I mean that you can't really make it look like it's another page on your website, and you can't pass information from paypal to your site.
When a person adds an item to their cart, they are taken to a paypal page displaying the contents of their cart. Checkout is done through the paypal site. When I used it, you could pass the customer back to a thank you page on your site, once they were done checking out, but you couldn't pass any details of the order to display.
Someone with the programming skills could build a shopping cart within a website that could finalize an order, and then pass the users order to paypal or some other service for checkout, but I didn't have those skills. I could do just enough to have the cart on paypal's site, and minipulate the forms on my site to accomodate paypal's format.

[executioner]

Sue,

Check with Daniel or Dan I think he has some experience in this field.

[sue d.]

I'll look at Paypal but I really need a few things:

Physical product purchasing (CD and misc. stuff)
Digital downloading

Having trouble finding a cart that can sell all 3.

[gman]

I did a quick search and the first thing that came up was something called bitbuffet. They host your files and provide the code that gives you payment buttons linked to your paypal cart. After checkout, the customer receives a download email. That was one person's solution for combining physical product sales through paypal, with digital sales, and they've turned it into their own business.

[Dan]

Check out 2CO that might have what you need.

https://www.2checkout.com/