Hello, I'm currently running a site for a band and we'd like to set up a store on/related to our site. The store will be rather small, with pretty much less than 10 items at all times...very likely less than 5. We just want to be able to sell CDs and soon tshirts from the site. Since it'll be a small store, I don't want to be paying high (or any) monthly fees. I'd like something that's attractive and not shady looking (which would scare customers away). Being able to display pictures of the products would be great. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what to do?

Greetings,

Well, you have 2 choices (If you use a Merchant Account such as PaySystems.com or similar offer):

1) You can create webpages for all of your products with description and all the things you want to put there. Then just put a link to the order page of your (already registered) Merchcant Account with the prices setted up before.

2) You can create a shopping cart (again with the Merchant Account) and put all the description and stuff there.

Anyway, Good Luck :)

Hi there,

www.mals-e.com is a great flexible cheap solution.

If you can process credit / debit cards manually it's excellent. If you're looking to get automated online card checking and debiting it will cost more.

If you say it's small scale there's nothing stopping you combining something like Mals-e with Paypal to keep your commitment costs down.

- Mike

I recently bought a T-Shirt from a site using http://www.shopfitter.com My card was charged the right amount and it looked nice. I haven't used it myself

Set up a Yahoo! store.

Many options...

PayPal works great with their store fuctions.

Beter is OSCommerce (http://oscommerce.com)

Good is also Agora (http://agora.com)

Most of these can be easy installed or are already available with many hosts.

Anton

as far as t-shirts and other items go, setup a store at cafepress.com

El Barto,

I would recommend using Paysystems for processing credit cards. They have been excellent with us since we started using them in late July. Having all your items in one shopping cart is much more friendly to the user than seeing a Paysytems for your CD's and a Cafepress for ordering t-shirts. Remember, e-commerce must be easy and users dont' want to see 3 different stores when ordering basically the same products from one band.

They may also want to pay by cheque, many people fear using credit cards online so give them that option as well.

Before I got a merchant account, I used http://www.ccnow.com -- not too cheap, but they maintain the shopping cart, ssl, and you use their merchant account. That was before PayPal was set up with a cart. You have to sell physical merchandise, and like most things like this you can't do things like give partial refunds, add things to orders, or take phone/fax orders.

They were really easy to work with and it got us over the hump to where we got our own merchant account. I use a custom-written PHP shopping cart that we wrote up in a Web Techniques article and process my cards manually which works for me.

Al Williams

Powersurge.net has just revamped our Ecommerce packages using Store Front Now software.

http://www.powersurge.net/orders/service/newaccounts/storefront/sfn.html
If you have any questions please let me know.
This pricing includes hosting and shared ssl cert.

Matt@powersurge.net
ICQ 165636161
1-800-867-5055 ext 106

addaction,

Agora seems to be down. This is all that's displayed when you go to the address you posted:
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Error opening E:\live\web\www.agora.com/../../config/agora.com/site.xml

The system cannot find the path specified.
line: 0 col: 0 text:
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

There are lots of free and really good shopping carts around to choose from. It is mostly the question of time you want to spend on installing and customizing the cart. Eg. OSCommerce is a very advanced free shopping cart (comparable to many commercial ones). If you have a lot of time on your hands you can create a really good looking online store with it. If you want to do it quick - try Agora or Interchange. With many webhosts you can install these two carts with a couple of clicks from your hosting account's control panel.