[Jehozadak]

Wow, I have received a wealth of information in response to my original post. I am really pleased for all the great input. I am going to check out paypal pro and see what that's all about.
Regarding giving my webdesigner access to my paypal account so he can match up the styles of shirts for checkout, it still seems a bit weird to me, after all, it is linked to my biz checking. Heck, I wouldn't even give my wife that info...
tribecat

I recall that If you have a Business Account with Paypal you can add users and restrict their access to certain elements of your account. Log in, go to profile, then Multi-User Access and see what it gives you. I haven't really used it much myself but thought it might help.

Adrian

 

[honeyflip]

Great thread. Thanks for all the info, folks. You should be charging consultant fees for some of this stuff. Er, forget I said that.

 

[badalou]

I use paypal vertual terminal on one of my sites (wholesale) and the party filling in the info does not know this. when I get the information I just enter the information that I receive through my shopping cart service and go to my vertual paypal account and walla, done deal. it cost me $20. a month.

 

[skulltshirts]

I use the paypal shopping cart. So i understand what it would be like to give your account info to a web publisher you dont know.
You could give him access to your account so he can create the html code for the shopping cart, or you can attempt this yourself. It really isnt to hard to do. If you give him access, just remember to reset your account with a new password when your done. If this person is designing your whole site, you should trust him somewhat right. I know, not enough to give him access to your bank account. So I suggest you attempt to create the code yourself. Dont forget to set your shipping options while your at it.

Thomas

 

[mint274]

To make paypal buttons for your site, the web site designer just needs your paypal email address and what you are selling. Paypal buttons are quite easy to do if you use a program like dreamweaver.

 

[bgreaterthan]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the t-shirt biz and I'm currently working on my website. I'm going to use paypal for payment but I'm confused about what exactly I need. Do I just link my website with paypal? Do I also need a shopping cart? If I have paypal, don't I automatically have shopping cart or is that something separate I need to get? Thanks for any help you can offer. I know these are rookie questions.

Kelly

 

[Rodney]

If I have paypal, don't I automatically have shopping cart or is that something separate I need to get?

Yes, but it is very limited.

Do I also need a shopping cart?

If you want to be able to manage products, orders, shipping, customers ,j product options, more effectively and have a more user friendly shopping process, yes.

There are free shopping carts that you can install like zencart, oscommerce, cubecart that can integrate with PayPal for the payment processing.

 

[skulltshirts]

For a paypal cart all you do is login to your account at paypal and look for the add to cart buttons. That generates the code and then you copy the code to your web pages.

 

[RescueShirts]

FYI...

I followed some very easy instructions that were on Paypal... and "hacked" the code to do exactly what I needed for selling shirts via the free Paypal shopping cart.

It's fairly simple for my purposes... all I needed is choice of sizes, with additional amount of $$$ for 3XL and 4XL... and a choice of shirt colors...
http://www.rescueshirts.com/test.htm

Brett

 

[mint274]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the t-shirt biz and I'm currently working on my website. I'm going to use paypal for payment but I'm confused about what exactly I need. Do I just link my website with paypal? Do I also need a shopping cart? If I have paypal, don't I automatically have shopping cart or is that something separate I need to get? Thanks for any help you can offer. I know these are rookie questions.

Kelly

Hi Kelly,

To make paypal buttons you have to log into your paypal account then go to
merchant services > buy now buttons. That page will ask you about 3 questions and it will then make the html code you need. You have to copy that code and paste it onto your website.

If you want to sell hundreds of t-shirts, I think it would be better to use a free shopping cart system like oscommerce. With oscommerce I can put up 100 t-shirts in about 2 hours. Using the paypal website it would take me about 24 hours to put up 100 t-shirts. Oscommerce does have problems. Customers have to log in to use your website (no one likes to log in to a website). OSC. is a very very complex system and if you tweek it wrong, the whole website will disappear. I put an example of my Oscommerce paypal site in my signature. Hope this information helps.

 

[bgreaterthan]

Thanks for the info everyone! Very helpful.

Hey Brett or Rodney,

In paypal, how did you offer choices for sizes or colors without adding a separate "Add to Cart" button. I've successfully added the buttons but I'm having trouble figuring that part out.

Thanks again! Kelly

 

[Rodney]

On the PayPal shopping cart page, instead of clicking the Create Button Now button, you click the Add More Options button and you'll see a page where you get to choose your own options.

My suggestion would be to NOT use the PayPal shopping cart though. You should use a dedicated cart that will allow you more flexibility and a better shopping experience for your customers.

 

[RescueShirts]

To make my test paypal shopping cart required some additional techniques I found here:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/sc-techniques

You must be logged in to paypal to view this page.

Basically... the additional code was to be able to charge additional amounts for shirts larger than XL... which I did without problems.

I didn't use ALL of the techniques listed on these pages... however, they are not too difficult.


I really don't want to get into the paypal shopping cart versus other shopping cart debate.

This is my first t-shirt website... but I have sucessfully sold many other items online using paypal without problems after $1000's upon $1000's worth of transactions.


On the other hand... I am pretty proficient at web design... and I do a lot with templates.

For instance... Yesturday... it took me about an hour to add the modified paypal shopping cart code to about 88 pages of my site (that version is not online).

Once I got the code right for one product... I just pasted the code onto the other pages, then changed the item description... piece of cake.

Also... since my products are on their own pages... and not included in a shopping cart program... my site is very search engine friendly.

Heck... I am already in the top 3 to 8 for many of my keywords/phrases! Not bad for a site that isn't selling anything yet... (and yes... people are finding me... I track all traffic and referring sites/search engine pages.)


If you are not that website savvy... a self-contained shopping cart program that let's you add products easily may be the way to go.

Since I have been doing this web stuff since 1998... my ways are really easy for me... but don't always translate to other people's websites.

As always... your mileage may vary!

Brett

 

[Rodney]

Also... since my products are on their own pages... and not included in a shopping cart program... my site is very search engine friendly.

Having your products in a shopping program doesn't stop them from being search engine friendly. A new page is created for all of your products just like if you did it manually.

If you are not that website savvy... a self-contained shopping cart program that let's you add products easily may be the way to go.

Since I have been doing this web stuff since 1998... my ways are really easy for me... but don't always translate to other people's websites.

I think even if you are web savvy, having a shopping cart is a smart move.

It lets you manage products much more easily, it doesn't give you the popup windows that paypal does, it gives shopper a standard shopping process that they are used to, it can help you manage customers and orders. Also, it will help you manage payment options as you grow. Some customers won't want to pay with paypal (for whatever reasons), so when you can add more payment options, you can reach more customers.

I've been selling t-shirts online since 1996 and it's definitely something I would recommend for anybody that is wanting to sell t-shirts.

I think a paypal shopping cart is good if you are just starting out and you only have 1-2 products to manage.

But once you start processing your own transactions through your own merchant account and you get several t-shirt designs to sell, you will really appreciate how much time a shopping cart program will save you.

It makes it very easy to add a product, and add attributes like +$2 for XXL or different shipping options or coupon codes for marketing purposes or additional checkout fields.

 

[kyoru]

Hello, just skimming through the site. I'm not sure if you are aware of this but there is a way to use Paypal at the end of your transaction and manual load the Paypal shopping cart. Search up "IPN" and "PDN". Basically your website stores the info about the purchases, say the customer wants design a and design b. the customer then decides to check out, your website then sends the information about the purchases to paypal (for example you can send variables for each item, including description, size, cost, weight, etc). paypal will display everything in its cart and the customer finishes a transaction there and then will be returned to your site. paypal will then send a transaction report to your website and you can do whatever from there (update inventory etc.)

this is not something you should look into if you are not web savy because it requires one to know a combination of perl/php and mysql, and it took me numerous hours for it to work properly. i would post my site but i beleive it is against rules.

in any case, yes your programmer needs access to your paypal account.