Thread: Oh wise person, please help me with my shopping cart confusion!

OK here I go...Originally I was going to cut and paste paypal buttons and paypal carts to my website. However, I currently have over 50 products, and plan to have about 100 when I finish photographing...And I plan to have thousands once I quit my day job (just a little exaggeration). Most every product i offer can be ordered in different, colors, lengths, and/or metals (silver or gold). Some of these options require additional $ added to the price. This is not very efficient when it comes to using the paypal standard service. However, I realized today that I am actually enrolled in Paypal Pro, because I pay monthly for the "virtual terminal" fees for my credit card transactions at arts and crafts shows.

So the guy at PayPal said I could integrate a third party cart. Naturally I picked Oscommerce because it is free and first on the list. I watched the tutorial and installed it, wrote down all the important info. NOW WHAT? The second tutorial starts at some menu i have never seen before. How do I get there. I'm sure once I get there I can figure it out. Where do I go? This is where i am totally lost! Do I need to integrate...I don't understand, I need a shopping cart, not a whole other program to make the website....just a shopping cart. A shopping cart that will link my B.V. website. I wish paypal's cut and paste had a little more flexiblity, because I wouldn't mind pasting the code 500 times. At least I would know what I was doing!

One more thing, I LOVE the B.V. drag and drop system. It is totally AWESOME! My website is super duper fabuloso and I am not willing to change the layout of it for the world. Is this OsCommerce going to change the look of my site? This is where I get confused!

Thanks in advance for reading this post. I really appreciate the feedback and information that has been provided to me both directly and indirectly. I only hope that I can become a pro at this and help other people on the forum too someday! Can wait until I am finally done and can post the site on the forum for a good critique:)

There are several carts that you can use. Believe Beth's post addresssed a lot of these.
By the way, I use PayPal for the tea web site and it isn't a problem for 100 products.

Beth's shopping cart is Cart Manager and I looked into the installation and set up, it looks very user friendly and you can customize the template.

If you want something totally unique that gives you everything you want, check with Navaldesign. He is building a personalized 'shopping cart' and database for me. It is gonna be da bomb!

Click the below to check out our other shopping cart Soholaunch....

http://www.vodahost.com/soholaunch.htm

Thanks for all of your help and support. I guess I am still confused how to link any of these services (Soho, cartmanager, e-commerce) to my site without changing the overall setup and design. Can someone explain how to do this? I have loaded a cart into Fantastico, but still am unsure how the two are linked. I don't think the tutorials explained this. I am a complete novice with this, and that could be the problem too :)

You would have to rebuild your site in Soho if you use the cart. But if that is what you want... Soho is great. It even comes with a newsletter program.
I don't know about ecommerce but I believe they have their own templates they want you to use.
If you don't want redesign - Cart Manager is the one you want. Check out Bethers website, moxie enterprises, you can get Cart Manager from her. I am sure Bethers would be able to guide you with set up.

I will check that out, and if it does not work, I will just do the Paypal button thing, because that is what I feel comfortable with. Thanks so much for your help and input, I don't know what I would do w/out this forum of sharing people!