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Needing Drop-in eCommerce Gadget

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 9:35 pm
by volomike
On a low bid contract I picked up on the side of an existing contract I have, I'm needing a drop-in eCommerce gadget or script so that the guy can provide his catalog of documents he's written. The gadget needs to let one browse everything from my page, not hop off somewhere to some other page on some other site. Once the selection is made and someone wants to use it, the thing needs to give us a shopping card and ordering mechanism. I want to almost spend zero effort on this -- just drop in the HTML code, let him enroll in the service and pay for it, let him upload his catalog information, and he's off and running. I really don't want to integrate a super fancy shopping cart system -- just something simple. I also don't want to write it myself because time is critical here.

In short, have you heard of a service out there that provides shopping gadgets for a low cost where you can build your own store of your own goods and let people order them? I noticed that Amazon sort of has this feature, but they don't permit some kinds of items.

My client also doesn't have a lot of cash to enroll for this service -- perhaps only $400 per year + 2-4% transaction fees.

Re: Needing Drop-in eCommerce Gadget

Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:03 am
by ghurtado
With a lot of eCommerce experience on my back, I can tell you that this:
volomike wrote: ... not hop off somewhere to some other page on some other site.
Is at odds with this:
volomike wrote: ... just something simple.
The reason is straightforward: if your client wants the shopper to stay on their site all the way through checkout and payment (the proper way to do it for all but the most basic "Yahoo stores" type sites) , the only way to do accept and verify credit cards is by connecting to his own payment gateway in the backend, for which you need a merchant account of your own.

Having said that, with the right eCommerce package (take a look at http://www.magentocommerce.com/ ) this payment gateway integration can be straightforward, provided your client handles the process of getting a merchant account herself. Either way, with those requirements you start to fall a little bit far from a simple "drop in" solution.