Whereupon I intermittently complain about my
programming difficulties and offer little help to anyone.

Monday, December 8, 2008

e-commerce preferences

A client's site needs some kind of shopping cart to sell gift certificates. For my time and money, the simple and elegant solution is PayPal.
However, it seems that people don't like PayPal, or so I am told. Is signing up for an account that takes money from the same place any other shop would take money too complicated? If you've ever bought anything on eBay, odds are that you already have a PayPal account. Is it the leaving of the site you are shopping on? That might make sense as one doesn't generally leave the store they are shopping in to pay for their goods elsewhere in the brick-and-mortar world.

The current alternative is the e-shop that comes bundled with the client's hosting plan. It is a large store with more features than I probably understand. A template must be chosen and customized. The items for sale may require photos and there will be a fair amount of data entry. It may require an SSL certificate. Plus who knows what else.
But it may be prettier and look more like the original site.

What to do?