Integrating a Shopping Cart to an Existing Photography Website

<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>

<p>On which framework is the site running? Is your site entirely made of static HTML, or are the images you're going to show people going to be presented by dynamically rendered pages run by the shopping cart? Are you using .Net, PHP, classic ASP ... ? <br /><br />Shopping cart code that executes ON the server that's hosting the web site needs a carefully tuned and secured environment, and the underlying database system needs to understand all about the products your'e selling. At that point it makes more sense to let the shopping cart software actually handle the storage and presentation of the products themselves, rather than trying to graft shopping behavior on top of content that's rendered in some other way.<br /><br />If you do want to go with the bolted-on add-to-cart behavior, you might as well just use PayPal's native add-to-cart behavior, which does everything you described. But it can be a little fragile in that part of the visit is on your site, and part of the visit is somewhere else.<br /><br />By the way, you CAN use services like Smugmug to showcase and take orders on your work, but TURN OFF their fulfillment services so that you have to take the action to fill the order. But that really kills your efficiency.<br /><br />Consider using a framework like Drupal and its native Commerce module to both present and cashier your work. The entire thing can run on your server, and it can pass the baton to PayPal for checkout/payment. You then clerk the order as you see fit, afterwards.</p>

<p>Matt, I designed the website using Dreamweaver CS5. Your last paragraph seems to be what I'm looking for. I want to present and sell my work through my own website. Once the person's ready to cash out, then they'll go to Paypal. I have too many items to simply put a "buy now" button on my site where each option is location. I didn't know Paypal had an "add-to-cart" behavior. I just looked and it appears that I may be able to add Paypal's "add-to-cart" buttons on each location and it allows shoppers to continue to shop when they view their cart. Perhaps this is my solution. You may have answered my question. Thank you for your suggestion.<br>

David</p>

<p>I am a programmer by trade, so I wrote my own "shopping cart" solution and used Paypal as the backend for payment. It's relatively easy to dynamically generate the required paypal fields and let the users "submit" the order to paypal for payment, but in my case I am just dealing with prints. If you want to see how my site works, send me an email and I'll send you a link.</p>

<p>David,<br>

You can get a very complete solution for selling products using Wordpress and WooCommerce plug-in, both free. It immediately integrates with Paypal and I think Authorize.net. It's very easy to setup as I've done it for us at http://thewildgrizzly.com and only cost me $50 for the WordPress theme and the hosting ($5 a month?). However, this is a product based e-commerce solution. I'm not sure if you're selling photos you already have made or if you're selling prints to customers. WooCommerce is very robust, but it's not specifically a photo e-commerce plug-in so you couldn't use it to select a photo and then put it on a mug or mouse pad. But you could sell mugs and mouse pads with a photo on it if the customer put the photo # in the comments of the order. </p>

<p>If you're selling prints or mugs and such to your customers with their photo on it, maybe contact Smugmug support. I THINK they have subscriptions with more advanced shopping cart configurations that let you configure different items and send all orders to you rather than their printer. I set something something like this up for http://johnfinleyphotographer.com so fulfillment was handled by us and they handled the payment processing. But I would check with them just to be sure. <br>

<br />Hope that helps. </p>

<p>Curious if the OP ever found a suitable solution. I am also trying to add a shopping cart to an existing photography website and getting frustrated with the options available. I am operating with wordpress and trying to sell prints of my photographs as customers request them. (self filling the orders either by printing myself or using a local lab)<br>

Thanks</p>

<p>Hey Audrey Parnell--<br>

can you share a link to your site? I've been thinking about making and giving away a free, easy-to-use Stripe integration for photography sites and am curious about your use case.<br>

Feel free to get in touch with me directly at ...@....com, too.</p>