Thread: Website with PayPal cart vs. e-Commerce site

Looking for insight and opinions on using an existing website and adding product pages to it that will link with the BV PayPal buttons to a PayPal cart as opposed to creating a separate e-commerce site and linking it to a tab on the existing website.

Are there any advantages or disadvantages to going one way or the other?

Thanks,
Scott

Depends...how many products are you going to be selling?

Good question. There are a couple sites actually that I'm looking at for folks. One will probably only have a hand full (10 or so) whille another could have upwards of 80-100.

From your question Darren, I'm assuming you may suggest the external e-commerce site would be better for the guy that has several products to sell? If so, why would that be the better option?

You would be better off sticking with PayPal and integrating it into your Blue Voda site that you already know how to manage and update at will. Using custom buttons and icons is another way to fully present a more integrated look and feel to your web design, and you will not lose any functionality by doing so.

Undertaking a full-scale eCommerce solution will require you to learn a whole new web environment, after which you may still find yourself far too limited to accomplish what you originally envisioned.

You may find some of the details in this thread copmparing the highlights of other "carts" helpful in making a final determination of what your real needs are and to what degree you are willing to invest in acquiring the ability to create a solution that will deliver the results you desire:
Comparing Shopping Carts: Fantastico + Magento

When you start building shops it can become a big project and you are right to research the options from the outset.

80 - 100 products does equal 80 - 100 pages you have to build in Bluevoda, if done properly. Hard work!!

What I am going to suggest is using a clever bit of cart software that you can embed into a BV page. To learn more, visit www.ecwid.com. Yes it will be something else to learn (have you got 20 mins spare?) but you will end up with the flexibility of Bluevoda for your site pages and all the power of Ecwid to manage your inventory.

BTW Ecwid is FREE up to 100 sku's

Originally Posted by DarrenC

80 - 100 products does equal 80 - 100 pages you have to build in Bluevoda, if done properly. Hard work!!

Not True! You can build a page uisng PayPal in Blue Voda as large as you want, to hold as many products as you want, and most definitely NOT have to use one product per page as you say ....

As you can see on this site with SHORT PAGES there is plenty of room for six products, and had the site owner wanted to use a different site background that would lend to being able to have "taller pages" there would be no need for '2nd' pages in her Collections.

You can have as many products on a Blue Voda page using PayPal as you can fit within your page design! I have seen Blue Voda sites done very slick with 60-90 products per Category page (albeit using the smaller thumbnail in Lightbox), which pretty much resembled a typical osC or ZEN cart site being done so well.

PayPal cart is a rather limited solution, if you need to have product details, and not just a picture and two lines of code, a long description, stock control within your own site, two or three options, related products, shipping based on destination location and order weight (USPS, UPS and other known carriers) etc. In that case, you can't actually use PayPal. I can mention many more features (customer registration, wholesale areas, more than one pricing lists depending on customer "usergroup", draft orders, merchant accounts (if lots of sales are expected it is more convenient) plus stock alert mails, customized reports, statistics etc.

I can't know what the requirements in this cas are, so most probably Vasili's suggestion about using a PayPal cart is the best solution especially if no great experience exists. A database driven cart is, instead, a better solution, for advance users.


PS. Darren's link doesn't contain any affiliate link.