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david_lundquist1

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  1. <p>I'm a newly professional photographer who is designing my photography e-commerce website. I’ve pretty much completed the website and now am ready to integrate a shopping cart feature. I’ve been doing a ton of research and it’s pretty frustrating trying to figure out how exactly to go about integrating this thing so that it does what I’d like it to do.<br> Basically I need a dynamic application that allows shoppers to choose items to add to the shopping cart, remove items freely, keep a running tally of these items, and eventually lead them to a checkout option, which will then take them to a payment gateway like Paypal or Authorize.net.<br> Everywhere I look on the web I basically see two options:</p> <ol> <li>Pay a monthly fee (~$30/mo.) to a company who hosts a shopping cart and manages everything, or</li> <li>Buy the software and integrate it myself.</li> </ol> <ul> <li>With the first option, it seems to be geared more for those who need an e-commerce site built and a shopping cart integrated. These also appear to manage everything from processing and shipping the order. I don’t want the shopping cart host to print my photos and ship them to my customers. I specifically have a printing lab that I want to use for every photo ordered, and I’m using Shutterfly to produce any specialty items ordered (calendars, coasters, blankets, mouse pads, magnets, ect.). I think that these hosts also require you to still use a separate payment gateway like Paypal, which charges a small fee for each transaction. This is pretty pricey when you tack on the website hosting fee and other expenses each month.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>The second option seems geared towards e-commerce sites that sell products like clothing or other normal store items that have sizes or colors...not photography products. If I can use this method then it seems to be cheaper. The software is $200 - $300, but if that’s a one-time fee, then I’ll use it and pay the small fees to Paypal for each transaction. I just don’t know if this is the right way to go though.</li> </ul> <p>I just need a shopping cart that will, once a payment has been cleared and received, alert me with all the details of an order that was just made so that I can begin to process it myself (ordering the print or photography product and then ship it myself to the customer).<br> Does anyone know the answers to these questions? This is literally all I have left on my website before I create all the “add to cart” links and launch it.<br> David</p>
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