PayPal Shopping Cart vs. Other shopping cart

[Ian]

I wanted to get feedback from anyone here who may have experience with this. I currently use the PayPal shopping cart for my e-commerce site, as it obviously allows me to conduct business without having to open a merchant account and incur a monthly fee. They simply take a percentage (which isn't exactly small, but that's another issue). We've had a fairly high conversion rate of customer visits versus sales, however I'm trying to obviously make it better.

The question I have is about the conversion rate when using PayPal vs another shopping cart and merchant account combination. Has anyone here ever used the PayPal shopping cart system, and then switched to a different shopping cart and merchant account only to see an increase in sales as a result? I'm wondering if I'm losing customers using PayPal as my shopping cart vs. using another system.

The tough part is I currently can not track how many people get to the checkout area and then click out, so I don't have any data to support my concern. PayPal doesn't allow you obviously to put code in to track that.

At any rate, does anyone have any insight to this?

Thanks in advance.

Ian

[Tommo]

At any rate, does anyone have any insight to this?

Thanks in advance.

Ian

Ian,

The general rule of thumb seems to be $1000 dollars per month or under use paypal anything more look at a merchant account.

Of course If looking very professional is a key factor then that figure will come down

[expat]

Hi,
we started long time ago with single item paypal.

Than bought and plugged in an independent shopping and cart system (cubecart.com) and added worldpay (I knowit's expensive but the recognistion factor is wht we pay for).
We tweaked this over time in terms of function and SEO/SEM.

We just added another local payment system and are looking at far east systems.

So it also depends a bit wher your customer base is.

Don't forget to also allow cheques or postal and banktransfers for maximum choice to your customers at minimal cost to you.

The good thing is at present we see PayPal explosion up from single % to near 30% of all purchases.

Best of luck
Expat

PS check for a thread payment systems should have lots of info

[DJ-MASTER]

The tough part is I currently can not track how many people get to the checkout area and then click out, so I don't have any data to support my concern. PayPal doesn't allow you obviously to put code in to track that.

[expat]

The tough part is I currently can not track how many people get to the checkout area and then click out, so I don't have any data to support my concern. PayPal doesn't allow you obviously to put code in to track that.

sure does! allows you to passthrough vars so you can update a file or write a record when PP paqid or you can use the automatic payment notification to release the order etc.

thus checkout - clicked on PP and run through can be measured.
If you update the shopping cart record at each stage you know precisely what and where...

Expat