Can anyone give me the 411 on shopping carts?
I have a client that wants to sell gift cards on their website but I would like to find a quick-to-implement solution (5 to 15 hours). The only thing we would sell is gift cards (just one gift card in different amounts - they are gift cards for the client's restaurant) but we don't want to jump to a different domain or display a different brand.
My first thought is paypal...beyond that I'm not sure.
Thanks for any incite! Scott
You can also try ZenCart. Their website says they have PayPal Pro support. So since it's Open Source too you'll have all the code I presume.
Google Checkout is made for what you're doing. Super-easy to implement (closer to your 5 hours than your 15) and works excellently.
Great solution if your client doesn't mind it being hosted outside their URL.
There are a multitude of shopping carts out there. The quickest and easiest one would probably have to be FatFreeCart running on top of Wordpress.
It doesn't have many features, but does support checkout via PayPal. This would probably be the quickest route.
If you are looking to invest more time, but not get too complicated, I would recommend OpenCart or PrestaShop, which are both standalone shopping cart systems.
People will trust money to your website much, much more easily if you display the Paypal or Google Checkout brand. If you process credit cards yourself, you're limited to the trust of the brand you already have, at best.
From your description of only selling one gift card of varying amounts, I'd steer clear of any full-fledged cart. A great 3rd party to use is e-junkie.com The user never leaves your site and the payments are processed with PayPal and/or Google Checkout (as long as you have an account with them).
I've used e-junkie for several years and the best thing about them is they keep up with PayPal's and Google's API's so you don't have to. Just add their script to your site, set your variables and you're off and running in a couple of hours.