MAL'e e-commerce

Hello guys,
I have been reading the great posts about shopping carts. I am interested to use Mal'e e-commerce.

Any one has experience with using it? It seems very comfortable since everything is done outside the site.

I am worried that having shopping cart outside the site will scare the users, what do you think?

Thanks

 

Anytime you take a user off of your website you risk scaring some of them or looking less professional. That is the price you pay for using a third party solution. On the other hand you (usually) get a robust solution that you can implement quickly and (usually) will do a reliable job for your customers. It's a trade off that you have to consider when weighing your options.

 

Do you think users will not like it or even notice it if I use third party shopping cart?

Thanks

 

I think some will, and other won't.

At first glance, you might think then that it's doens't really matter, right?

wrong.

The important thing is that some users WILL notice, and that some users WILL not like it. Do you really want to turn away customers?

Personally, I'll take every customer I can get, and I'll offer them as many options as I can. A merchant account/payment gateway PLUS a third party processor like Paypal is always the best way to go.

 

You mean to avoid any shopping cart and use third part processor to charge people money?

 

Let me backtrack a little here, and see if I can help.

First of all, when you use a shopping cart, it shouldn't be outside your website. It should become your website. nearly all shopping carts these days are designed to either (a) be your content management system, where all of your cantent is brought inside and managed through the cart, or (b) interface with your content management system though an API.

What I was saying earlier is once you have selected on your cart software, make sure you have different types of payment options.

You should offer paypal or equivient to people that like to use paypal or dont mind third party processors, and you should have your own merchant account/payment gateway, so that people who prefer for you to process it directly and/or do not like paypal/3rd party processors have a second option.

It's always better to offer more than one kind of payment processor.

As far as cart software goes, I'm not impressed with Mal's. I'd recommend trying Zen-Cart. Drupal (blog/CMS software) also has a decent ecommerce portal, if you want to use something a little more robust in the article/content management side.

But the bottom line is, unless you want to look completly amaturish, don't expect to be able to do any business by 'bolting on' a shopping cart to your already exisint site. Hire a professional to integrate your site into a shopping cart for you, or learn how to do it yourself.