paypal shopping cart for wedding website

We are a professional photo studio that does about 35

weddings a year. Because of client demand we have begun the

process of putting wedding proofs on line for out of town family to

view and ostensibly purchase.

We looked into services such as Pictage, etc, but were not

pleased with the lack of creative control over images (ie, they

require UNTOUCHED jpegs, allowing no cropping, curves,

retouching, etc.) and the cost outlay. We know many photogs

who have stopped doing Pictage because they weren't seeing

enough sales to justify the expense. So we thought, if we might

not make much money from it, we might as well do it ourselves.

We have an established site, an in house programmer, and

would like to use paypal since they don't charge any fees.

However, we have upwards of 500 imags per wedding, and pay

pal requires you to add html button tags to EVERY ITEM you wish

to sell. WAAAAY too time consuming to be worth it.

I know there ar many many plug ins and alterations for the

paypal checkout system, ie through dreamweaver etc, and

wanted to know if anyone out there has used them or modified

them to their satisfaction. We'd be willing to pay a reasonable

amount for a good solution. Any suggestions?

It's easy to generate a different paypal entry for each image, if you have a structured description (text file or database) of your images. I've done that for 9,000 different images that people can

order as <a href = "http://terragalleria.com/fine-art-prints.html">Fine arts prints</a>. Check that site to see how it is done. Your programmer should be able to handle that.

In the past I've used Paypal for different projects, and you (at least used to) have the

option to use a pull down field, such as you'd use for t-shirt sizes etc. You could use

one of those with corresponding numbers, perhaps a few seperate pull menus. One

for print size that sort of thing. Also, I beleive you can include a comments field so

that when you receive your order you get comments. You could have customers enter

relevant photo numbers in those fields. You may have to generate different buttons

for various print sizes offered to set up different pricing structures. I think it's

certainly possible without making 500 buttons per wedding. That wouldn't be very

efficient as you said.