Need help setting up online shopping cart on website

[Stangirl]

I'm setting up a small events organisation and need to work out how to get a shopping cart on my website so people can buy tickets. My turnover will be low to start approx 100 tix a month at £6-8 each. I'm finding all the advice really confusing and options really expensive. Can someone steer me please?

There are a few options when it comes to an ecommerce site, and really three questions to ask yourself.

1. Do you need a full all singing all dancing ecommerce site with stock management, order management, newsletter system, etc etc?

1. Do you need a site with a basic checkout, where people can add a product (in your case a ticket) to their shopping cart, with perhaps features like a discount code and categories

1. Do you simply need a few pages on your site with paypal buy-now buttons to buy a ticket

To demo what each of these might look like, here is a site we have produced for customers in each of the three types;

1. www.dampshopdirect.co.uk/
2. www.ramsheaddenshaw.co.uk/
3. www.myelitecv.co.uk/ebooks/

Option 1 is the most feature rich in terms of ecommerce functionality, and by far the most complex. Option 2 and 3 are much less complex but not as feature rich.

I hope that helps you understand what the three options are?

Adele
MakeUsAWebsite

Do you already have a website? If so the quickest/cheapest way to take online payments is to add a Paypal button next to each ticket - this a fairly simple thing to do. Info on Paypal website. Paypal then handle all the payment side and charge you a small percentage per transaction which is a good option if you have a low number of transactions. If you find that costs are stacking up then you would need to get a merchant bank number through someone like Streamline then use Payment Gateway such as Sagepay. If you don't already have a website Wordpress is really easy to set up and for simple eCommerce sites is a good option which can be free if you're prepared to set it up yourself. Also heard good things about Shopify for eCommerce sites.

Hi stangirl,
I would also recommend wordpress as it is free and easy to setup as a website. You can either go with wordpress.com which is hosted so you just need to create an account like you would for gmail or hotmail. Or you can use wordpress,org which you would need to host yourself but then provides greater flexible, although you would have to pay for hosting.

Wordpress comes with a lot of added features such as as event espresso lite (free version) which would enable you to create events and sell tickets, alternatively you could use a service like www.eventbrite.com.

Hope that was helpful, pm me if you need more info.

Hi
Having just set up my own small ebook business I can recommend a site where you can hire someone by the hour to do any IT job. peopleperhour.com.

I have used them time and time again and the cost is reasonable. I hope this is helpful.