It’s pretty easy to sell things from your website these days.
I get requests to connect websites to an in store POS system.

I believe it’s probably best if they’re both the same system.
Otherwise, I would recommend not connecting them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have a good free online shopping cart.
All you need is to be able export your part numbers to a flat file (and maybe a little excel).
The entire online cart can be updated, anytime in one simple upload.

I find that it works best if you give a list price. Discounts can be individual customers or store wide.

[shoppingcart]

Here’s something new from Google Checkout. It’s called the Google Checkout store gadget.

It’s still in Beta and is called experimental by Google so there are a few bugs, but the ones they listed seem pretty minor and I can’t believe Google would release something like this unless it was about finished. Judging from their past history with important new applications I believe the bugs will be exterminated quickly.

I haven’t tried the store out yet, but I will soon and report back to you when I do. According to Google here’s all you have to do to have a store on your site.

1. Set up your Google Checkout merchant account
2. Define your products in a Google spreadsheet
3. Set up and embed your gadget

You can embed these gadgets in almost any web page, blog post or the sidebar of your blog.

Before this PayPal seemed to be the only good option for a shopping system that’s easy to embed in a static page, but this could challenge them. At first glance I see some things that even seem easier to use than PayPal’s cart, their sandbox (testing) section for one.  PayPal does have quite a big lead in this area, but these gadgets could give Google Checkout quite a boost.

See the Google Checkout Store Gadget

I am currently working with a customer who wants to set up a store. They had a spreadsheet of the items that they want to sell. There are over 3,000 of them. Creating a database if items for a shopping cart is not that unusual, but in this case the item images were in the spreadsheet as a URL on the vendors website.

I didn’t want to hot link the images because there can be all sort of problems with that, so I needed to download and shrink most of them to a usable size. So for 3,100 images and thumbnails for each I was looking at over 6,200 images. No small task.

I did quite a bit of research and tried out several of each kind and I discovered two programs that I want to recommend here today.

First Free Download Manager, as the name says is free (and open source another plus) and designed to do much more than what I needed it to do. Free Download Manager allows you to: adjust traffic usage; to organize and schedule downloads; download video from video sites; download whole web sites with HTML Spider; operate the program remotely, via the internet, and more! It allowed me do save over 6,200 images in under two hours.

Next I needed to resize these images to fit in the cart so they wouldn’t crowd out the description or force things off the page. BIMP Lite came to my rescue. BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. BIMP is not open source, but it’s 100% FREE and contains no spyware, adware or nagware. It also does much more than resize, you can add many other image and file name operations.

A couple of great programs that I highly recommend.

In addition to designing websites, I am getting requests lately to just manage data for clients.
For example, shopping cart databases, Google or Open Office Documents. Some password protected and some not.

• I have found that the simplest solution is probably the best one.
• The htaccess file is simple to use and has good security.
• Of course, the level of security depends on how good of a password that you choose.

Because I like to also host my customers sites I know where to go to manage these files
I use cPanel which is free and open source. They make it pretty easy to do.

I keep spelling Lily as Lilly. Probably because of my last name, but I think that I got all of those fixed.

I think Old Timer & Lily is a very nice functional site.

Susan had a store on safeshopper.com and they sent a notice that they were closing. She needed a secure shopping cart quickly that she could maintain herself. OS Commerce is a good solution.

She runs a blog called loloschild and she knew about maintaining one, so having another one for her business is a good idea.

I think it’s a very comfortable site that visitors might like to hang around in. They have a good loyal customer base already, as evidenced by the fact that she started getting orders as soon as the site was up. If she keeps adding new content, which is pretty easy when you have a blog, there will be many new customers as well.

Visit Old Timer & Lily

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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called Moor Farm Shop. The site looks just like a country farm shop and is a good example of designing the entire site inside of a PHP shopping cart. Everything is clear and easy to find and use, although I couldn’t get the recipes to work.

I really like how this site looks, plenty of whitespace for easy reading and a good use of shadows. The navigation is done with pictures and JavaScript, but the actual links are in the code for the search engines to read and follow.

As I have said many times I would prefer plain text links and CSS for decoration, which works better for SEO. I would also like to have seen some kind of hover effect so that the visitor knows for sure when they are hovering on a link.

More…

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I was speaking to someone the other day who was looking to contract out work for a website because he had no experience with e-commerce.

While it’s ture that some shopping carts can be quite a job to install and debug I recommended “If your customer willing to use PayPal to process credit cards you can get their shopping cart (free) and install it yourself. It’s pretty easy.”

He replied a couple of days later “Thanks. After getting a 1200 dollar quote, I checked into other options and found the same thing. Your advice was much appreciated though, and confirmed what I thought I discovered.”

The customer should also do much better with the search engines as well because they will have static pages. Most shopping carts generate dynamic pages from databases and you usually have to overlay static pages to rank as well. They claim to be “search engine friendly”, but I have found that they don’t do as well.

It used to be PayPal meant you were working from your basement, but now it’s viewed just as “professional” as almost any other form of payment.

What is it?

When you use PayPal’s free Shopping Cart on your website, your customers can purchase multiple items with a single payment, browse your entire selection, and view a consolidated list of all their items before purchasing. The PayPal Shopping Cart is a low-cost way for you to accept credit card and bank account payments, and can be fully integrated with your website in a few easy steps.

What are the benefits?

Save time and money with PayPal’s hassle-free Shopping Cart:

• Easy to implement – no CGI scripting necessary
• No up-front costs – you’ll have the same low fee schedule used when you receive other PayPal payments
• Sell with ease – PayPal maintains detailed transaction records on our website
• Improve buyer experience – with customizable buttons and secure payments, happy customers become repeat customers

Learn More…