My vision is to use multiple websites to sell many unique items. I plan to build sites to sell the collectibles we have accumulated over the years without having to deal with Ebay. Thus it is very important to me that XSitePro play nicely with PayPal. Unfortunately, I am running into a fundamental design issue.
I want to sell many (thousands) of unique items from a lot of websites. XSitePro was designed for a user who wants to sell a few different products on multiple sites. This is such a significant design difference I am not sure it can be worked around.
When you enter a product for sale on an XSitePro website you can enter a description string, another string of your choice the currency (Dollars for example), and the price. The form says you have to use PayPal's global shipping options to deal with shipping and handling charges. The description string does seem to handle a complex URL without difficulty so the idea of using the URL of the page a product is described on as the product ID works.
PayPal's instructions and examples for setting up shipping options are not as clear as they could be. I spent two hours working on them and still don't understand exactly how what I set up on PayPal will interact with the data sent from my website when the Buy Now button is pushed.
These difficulties have forced me to think about exactly when and why I need real shopping cart software. If you want to let customers purchase more than one item at a time you need a shopping cart. However, the cart has to be able to handle item deletions when people change their minds, tax calculations which depend on location of the buyer, variation in product weight, variation in shipping speeds and a host of other factors. Shopping carts are NOT simple.
I am not certain all that complexity is always needed. I think most of my buyers will only buy one or two things. Would it be so bad if they had to buy them one at a time? It would cost me a little more because a part of the PayPal processing fee is charged per transaction. I think that is such a small amount I shouldn't worry about it. If the buyer is purchasing five or ten items it would be a pain for them to have to supply their details over and over. Finally, the shipping charges should be reduced when multiple items are going to the same address.
I think in my circumstances there are non-shopping cart solutions to these issues. If someone thinks shipping is to expensive I can post a notice I will refund any amount above actual cost. That will cost me another PayPal fee, but only $0.30. I can also tell buyers to send me an email with a list of items they want and I will package them up and send them an exact shipping amount. Both of these "solutions" slow down the transaction and squash an impulse purchase. I am not certain the buyers I expect to attract will be seriously put off by this. Most will be Ebay shoppers who are used to paying at once and waiting a few days for their purchase to arrive.
Finally, not all the sites I plan to publish will sell products. It may be worth purchasing XSitePro to use primarily to build content sites. Time will tell.
