shopping cart intergration & shipping

Robdav · 20 Apr 2006 at 15:42

Hi all,

I'm working on the design for a new site which requires a shopping cart and connection into a payment portal. I also need the ability to work out shipping costs using royal mail small parcles service as this is what my client currently uses and doesn't really want to change. So I'm looking for the following:

1) PHP/MYSQL shopping cart system that I can intergrate into the site. My client doesn't want to have a site with a shop attached, they want a site containing a shop, if you understand what I mean. Could cubecart be the answer?

2) Shipping costs worked out by the shopping cart.

3) something like 2checkout or protx as the payment portal, which the cart can interface with. My client doesn't have an internet merchant account yet so we're looking for something that we can use that doesn't require it. It's also been decided that paypal/nochex are not an option as they would give out the wrong message.

OK so any recommendations? I'll be honest, this is my first major go at an e-commerce site so any pointers would be appriciated.

many thanks

AS_Platinum · 20 Apr 2006 at 16:32

You could always create the shopping cart yourself, if you have DW theres a good extension PHP MX Shopping Cart you'd have to pay for it obviously, just put a little bit more markup on your price, there are others out there but they tend to cost a bit more, but obviously have a few more features.

With a bit of fiddling you can get it to pass data to any payment method.
If you was going to do it this way you could then get your client to enter all the relevent shipping costs etc him/herself.

Shopping carts are always fun!!!

ClearChaos · 20 Apr 2006 at 19:32

would definately recomend using protx + online merchant id, you can intergrate the payment pages into your site proving you have ssl available

always looks much more professional than redirecting to a 3rd party payment page

Robdav · 21 Apr 2006 at 07:52

ClearChaos said:
would definately recomend using protx + online merchant id, you can intergrate the payment pages into your site proving you have ssl available

always looks much more professional than redirecting to a 3rd party payment page

Sounds good, but my client doesn't have a merchant account. So anything else?

Also, do all 3rd party processors take you off-site to do the work or can I just feed them the info and then process the returned informaiton on-site?

zetec452 · 21 Apr 2006 at 15:32

Worldpay will do an invisible payment system but im pretty sure it costs a bit more. Protox would be a nice way of doing the website, you client will need to speak with their bank and setup a merchant banking account.

I've seen www.x-cart.com in use and it looks rather handy. Costs about $199 but would be worth the initial cost.