E-Commerce / Shopping cart software

[Nick martin]

Good morning all,

As I'm in the process of overhauling my website in order to sell directly from it, I'm interested in asking the forum members which software you all use for the acceptance of orders?

Years ago I had a successful website that I later sold, and at that time I used Actinic software to process card orders. It's still available but costs quite a lot of money.

Does anyone use Actinic, or does anyone have any recommendations for any other providers? Also on the same theme, I'm looking for ideas on which merchant service to use too in order to process payments ( assuming I'm fortunate enough to get ANY orders! )

With my old website, I rented a PDQ machine from Barclays for something like £30 per month. I then securely downloaded my orders each day and processed them via the PDQ machine. It worked well, although I did have to leave £10,000 on deposit otherwise it would have meant waiting 90 days for payments to clear!

Cheers,

Nick


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[Lucie]

I use Ecwid.
I built my site with an "off the shelf" website builders. Seemed like a good idea at the time & faster than getting my head around Dreamweaver, but the code behind it is CRAZY, which does me no favors with Google :(
Ecwid has been great though. It can be incorporated into most sites easily.
Not sure about the merchant account though - at the moment, I take payments via paypal.
Barclays wanted to hold my money for about 90 days before transferring it to me (unless I had a spare £5000 in a bank account for "insurance".
Most other companies seem to be underwritten by Worldpay. They start from about £25 a month, but I've been told you can haggle.

If you want a play around with Ecwid, just let me know. You can place a pretend order on my site to see it in action :)

[geti-titanium]

I've built websites using various systems and find BigCommerce a good powerful option and payments taken by PayPal are cheaper than getting a merchant account in the early days of not getting many orders
through the site.
You can create a test site here just to try it out and to become familiar with it :
http://www.guildofjewellerydesigners.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1133:big-commerce-website-service&catid=100&Itemid=533

It's a hosted service with different levels of subscription so all that is taken care of for you, all you need is to point your domain name at the BigCommerce servers.

Another system I'm getting into at the moment is Ixxo Cart:
http://www.ixxocart.com

This one is hosted on your own server, tricky to get your head round to modify the templates unless you just want to change theme colours though.

[enigma]

I have paypal which also allows for card payments using credit/debit cards without people having to open a paypal account.
Mine was really easy, its an artists website set up though so not really ideal for jewellery as you can't have a drop down menu.

[pearlescence]

Depends how serious you are. If you are expecting just a few small orders every day then paypal could be fine, but for a serious e-commerce with k payments you'll need a merchant account again. While paypal does what it says, I've never heard of anyone with a merchant account dropping it in favour of just paypal.
And the EU stopped the 90 day thing a few years ago. Payment comes through within a week or so now.
We use os commerce for our websites. Very customisable.

[Nick martin]

Thanks folks and sorry for my Late reply.

After much research, and from past experience of running an online business several years ago, I decided to go with Actinic.

Cheers,

Nick


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