With the delivery sorted for now, we had to solve the issue of getting paid. There are literally hundreds of shopping cart programs available on the net, ranging from free open source programs, to monthly packages costing $60 or more, to one-off purchase packages in the many hundreds of dollars.

The varying prices actually helped us narrow our search, because we just couldn’t afford much at all. Hubby investigated a few of the cheaper and free options and discovered that they can be extremely difficult to implement. This narrowed our search again – we now needed cheap and easy. Good would be nice too.

To further muddy the waters, we found that we’d need a merchant account and a payment gateway to process the payments, as well as substantial encryption and security on our site, all of which could cost thousands of dollars to set up. It was looking like we’d have to abandon our website and just set up a stall at the local markets.

Fortunately, we discovered that Paypal™ could offer us a solution. Using their system for payments meant that we didn’t have to set up a merchant account or payment gateway and as we didn’t have to worry about handling our customers credit card or personal information at all. Their transaction prices aren’t too bad, although for a larger website with thousands of transactions they would get expensive. For us though, it seemed almost perfect, until we tried to work out delivery charges…

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