Quandries re: Shipping Charges

Hi Myrna,
Anyone that has the skill to deploy an alternate solution for you is going to need a lot more information about the framework that your web site is built upon, before they can pitch alternate solutions to PayPal.

For example, a previous company I was with had good success using the Drupal back end, but it had to be customized rather dramatically to fit our site. However, it did allow multiple shipping options, and very intelligent configuration settings. So getting two of something didn't automatically double the shipping cost, for example.

There are some other techie questions in this forum, and I expect a couple of the posters would be useful people to talk to about this subject.

Best of luck with it!

You might want to think now about dispensing with Paypal altogether, especially in light of their new Hold on Funds policy. If you had your own merchant account (virtual terminal is available) you could plug in your own shipping charges at checkout.

This may seem like a silly question, but have you checked with your bank? Many now offer online merchant services.

You could get a shopping catalog/cart that does realtime shipping calculations as part of the checkout process. This is what I recommend for all my ecommerce clients; Shoppers like it as they feel they are paying "real" cost of shipping rather than getting overcharged by flat fee shipping. You can still use PayPal to process orders. Better for you too, as the shipping charge will be close to what your are actually paying.

Also, the cart that I use would "add to cart" with just one click. On your site, you have to click twice to actually put an item in the cart. This is confusing to shoppers and could cost you sales.

If you'd like to see a demo of the cart I use, let me know.

Some people put down PayPal, but I recommend it. Everyone is familiar with it and for small businesses it (along with Google checkout) is the most cost effective solution for taking online payments. There is no monthly overhead (unlike a merchant account) and you only pay when you have a sale. A merchant account has monthly fees plus you need to pay for a secure certificate (SSL) for your website. Unless your sales volume is over $5k month, Paypal is a better choice.