asecurecart.net and Paypal's Payment Pro - any good?

[mimsymc]

Hi folks. Here's a new topic for you. I've been spending days researching shopping carts/merchant accounts/gateways and it's mindbending, and a bit overwhelming. There are sooooo many products and companies to choose from and it seems at every turn I am faced with obstacles such as costs too much, need to know programming, too complicated, doesn't quite have the services I need, it's not an all-in-one product, etc.

So, here's what I'm leaning towards: http://www.asecurecart.net/main/order.aspx

+++: -has shopping cart, merchant account, and SSL
-only costs 16/month, with first 30 days free for trial run
-integrated with PayPal's Payments Pro, which provides me with some features that I need, like the Virtual Terminal
-don't need to know programming, just some basic HTML, which they provide a list of
-they accept travel and music sales, both of which I need
-good, prompt email support
-live chat

---: -no 800 number for tech support
-site doesn't have much info on it

So what do you think? Has anyone used their services? How about experiences with PayPal's Payments Pro (I already have a business account with them)?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Mim
--
Mim McConnell
Shelter Cove Publishing
617 Katlian St. #T5-04
Sitka, AK 99835
907-747-2860
shelter.cove.publishing@att.net
www.tongass.com

[hendrk]

Mim,

Hello. I read your subject posting...and I have a question for you. You mentioned that asecurecart has a $16/month maint fee...but how much (%) do they charge per transaction????

Right now I use PayPal's Payment Pro, and found that I am charged between 1.5 - 3.0% the value of each transaction, with no monthly maint. fee.

Let me know.

Thanks,

[CraigB]

Hi,

First, "you get what you pay for" is generally true. That applies to hosting, shopping carts, etc.

Will you want your cart to handle inventory and order points for you? Will you need more complex math such as quantity discounts? Coupons or other discount programs?

Can you control how much information is reserved to the "backend"? (Maybe you want to track inventory, but not show it to customers...)

What reports can you get about shopper experience -- their path through the site? YTD sales? Items which aren't selling?

Do you need different shipping rules or options depending on where you will be shipping?

Lots more work for finding the right cart to fit your business needs.

Hosting: bandwidth? uptime? performance guarantees? Hardware maintenence? What if a hard drive dies? Software maintenence (patches, etc.)?

I can say from experience that unless decisions are based on the **real** needs, regrets will be included at incalculable cost to business growth.

Craig

[mikedane]

It is the best and you get your money instantly 1% back on your purchases with Mastercard debit card and less that 72 hours to transfer whatever to your normal checking account....Merchant Services work and are extensive.....

[labeler2003]

I've tried several shopping cart services and I've ended up using AmeriCart for over five years (http://www.cartserver.com/americart/).

They cost a little more than Asecurecart, but they don't limit the number of transactions as Asecurecart does. They also don't limit the number of web sites. With my one account I once had shopping carts on over 60 web sites. (The orders were all send to a single point.) The one time I can remember having a technical problem they got the answer back to me in less than an hour.

I also like Americart because you only need to know HTML to design ordering pages that are a seamless fit for the web site.

[adacprogramming]

I'm not sure about the other cart, but something to watch for with paypal.

If you don't use their encryption feature with the button you set up, people can change the prices before they add to the cart.

The prices are in a hidden field, If I take your web page change that hidden field and then submit, If you are not paying attention I might get the item for "$10.00" instead of $100.00"

Maybe that's the same with other shopping carts? I normally build my own using a database.

[tberthel]

http://www.allbinary.com

[ozzie_jim]

Mim,

My website (www.coffee-machine.com.au) uses a free cart called OsCommerce (www.oscommerce.com). My hosting company (IXWebhosting $6.99/mth) has a button in the admin section that creates the shop for you. Once the shop is created you can customise it as much as you like from an admin control panel.

I bought an SSL cert from www.rapidssl.com for about $70. It's my own cert, not shared, apparently that's a good thing. IXWebhosting also provided a free shared SSL. It took a bit of reading the help pages to install but I got it done in about 1/2 hr.

OsCommerce has heaps of free plugins contributed from users. Including a few different PayPal plugins. I've used a merchant account plugin and also the Australia Post plugin. This goes to our postal service to find out the cost between two zip codes for different weight packages and returns it to the shopping cart - neat. If you ever move from PayPal to another merchant processor you can just use a different plugin.

To see the hundreds of free add-ons go to:
www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions

Some of the plugins require a bit of simple code changing to install but if and you want some technical assistance with the fine details you can ask for bids on www.rentacoder.com. There's thousands of very talented techie folk ready to help for a small amount. Check it out.

Over all I'm very happy with the combination of items we've used to create our shop. It's also very portable between different hosting services as it's free and open source. If I don't like our current host I can take it all with me. I was very wary of spending hundreds of hours setting up a shop on a proprietry cart system only to get hit with higher charges and not being able to go any else.

Hope this gives you some ideas,

Jim.

[TrafficProducer]

Here's some links to carts etc...

Online Payment, Shopping Carts, etc

[sherrif]

We recently purchased our own shopping site from http://www.ecommercetemplates.com for our site at http://www.eeeee.co.uk and it is superb.

I think it cost about $80 -ish

[skyway]

I use VP-ASP, http://www.vpasp.com, a shopping cart developed by a company in Austrailia. I have had good luck with the cart and have had contact with the company several times, as I have had them program special applications into the shopping cart for me. They were responsive, reasonably priced, and performed well.

[webbiz]

I use Authorize.net as the gateway for $7 a month and www.unitedbankservice.com as the processor. OScommerce free cart.

[dave]

Oscommerce could be best solution, for payment gateway you could check few more options such as protx, worldpay, chronopay, moneybookers, 2checkout ect that best match with your requirement.