Hey. I'm in the middle of designing a site for a friend, and he wants a shopping cart with it.
I went to college to do Graphic design, so we only really touched the surface of web design. So I can DESIGN a lovely site, but when it gets to coding etc.. I am a novice.

I don't want anything that's gonna take me months to figure out - he's paying me £250 for the whole thing - logo, site etc..

BUT. I want it to be secure. I've just found a free one on the internet that sounded good, but it said that it isn't secure. I've thought about using paypal's free one but I'm worried it will look a bit amateurish.

Any alternatives? It's a very small company so I don't need anything too heavy.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

ALSO. This is probably the wrong place to plonk this thread - wasn't sure which to post in.

Thanks!

Darran Mc

a good one is www.romancart.com

ive used it twice,

http://www.vantidy.co.uk &
http://www.bikerackshop.co.uk

Is about £50 for a secure cart with another £50 if you want to use secure images in the shopping basket and checkout pages.

You basically can just link your own buy buttons to the cart so in its basic form, its just cut and paste!

Originally Posted by rolda hayes

a good one is www.romancart.com

ive used it twice,

http://www.vantidy.co.uk &
http://www.bikerackshop.co.uk

Is about £50 for a secure cart with another £50 if you want to use secure images in the shopping basket and checkout pages.

You basically can just link your own buy buttons to the cart so in its basic form, its just cut and paste!

So does romancart actually process the card payment? And do you have to pay a monthly fee for the service? Thanks

I use a card machine so just get an email confirming order then log into their site to retrieve card details.

You can choose the type of payment method you have (paypal, world pay etc)

As far as i know, there is no monthly charge.
You dont have to upgrade the basket if you dont want to but it makes the pages look as if they are still you main site. Just makes things look neater.

I looked at your suggestion and there is a yearly charge, ranging from £50 to £200.

I wanted a simple cart without a monthly / yearly charge - is the paypal cart any good?

Also found one called Mal's e-commerce. I have no idea which one is the better?

the problem with nearly all the free carts is that they are not secure, if your designing a site for a small business i personally would use paypal, as:

1: paypal is a very well know company, and if people see the paypal logo they will feel more at ease with using the online store

2: paypal processes all payments and makes it real simple for beginners to use and is inexpensive to use

3: it is real easy to apply to your site, and it makes the code for you

You could at least start with paypal, and when your friend is earning mega-bucks, buy a top of the range super cart!

What features do you need? How many products are you selling? If you can tell us your needs we can make some suggestions

My clients us pdshop from pagedown, http://www.pagedowntech.com. They have carts and online store in both asp & .net versions, cheap and quick .

From my experience, paypal is the best one to go with if you have a small business and dont bring in a lot of money every month. Its also very simple. When I first started looking into shopping carts and payment gateways and everything, my head was spinning!