A few weeks ago a client asked me if I would help him sell a new product on-line. I said I knew about Paypal, but didn’t know any other shopping cart programs. It took us a week or so of chatting about his current credit card service, shipping and taxes. And it was amazingly complicated. His own bank had a service, but it would add over $100 a month to his banking bill and frankly, he has no idea how quickly his product will take off and I felt it was just too expensive. He agreed. I was given the name of another service which was supposed to be very easy to use. It had a separate website to deal with all the information on how to set it up! It was not overly easy. Our biggest issue was with shipping. He uses UPS. And wants to ship throughout all of Canada (not the US). But the costs for this were so vastly different. They ranged from $18 within Ontario to $30 to Northern Ontario with the East and West Coasts being slightly lower. So we couldn’t use a sliding scale as he would be over charging some people and under charging others. Paypal had what I thought was an integrated system with UPS but after two phone calls at an hour long (one long distance), I concluded that this wasn’t what they offered at all. If you had a UPS account, it would deduct the shipping from your account, but there wasn’t any way to calculate it as you went on where the items were going. And shipping isn’t as straightforward for shipping companies as it would have been for Canada Post (who couldn’t do the boxes our size). If you sent one carton at $30, to send two didn’t mean it was double that. they have their own sliding scale. So I couldn’t add the shipping to the buttons in case the customer bought two and was horrified to see the shipping costs!
I also contacted UPS to see if they had a payment system that integrated with their service and they recommended that I talk to my own tech. Oops, that is me. Sometimes it is hard to get a foot in.
In the end the client decided to do what he had thought at the beginning. We used Paypal and he stated quite clearly on the site that he would charge shipping COD and we gave a chart of the approximate costs to all of the provinces below the list of items for sale.
My final problem was with Paypal’s tech support. I finally, after being promised three times, was put through to an expert at coding rather than the general help desk. I was beginning to believe that this elusive team didn’t exist. This tech was very helpful with a few things that weren’t working. But Paypal has changed their button coding since I used this service before. It was opening a new window when you clicked on a “add to shopping cart” button. I was sure that it never did that before, plus I didn’t want customers to be confused. I found a great site called The Online Merchant Network that had the answer to the code I needed to fix the problem. It is so nice when people are happy to share what they have learned. Rather than saying something vague (which the Paypal support was saying), a lovely fellow at the forum above actually copied the code and highlighted the changes you needed to make it open in the current window. Top Class.
If you ever have a problem with something in your computer, I often find things for my clients by typing the problem in Google. I very seldom fail to find that someone else has had that problem and found a solution that we can all use.