https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/images/developer/auth_multiplecap…

I’ve spent the last 3 hours googling how to take a customer’s credit card number and charge it later. This is useful for products that are out of stock or if the customer wants to delay shipment. Nothing I found made any sense since I’m not an API programmer.

What’s more, nothing came up when I googled the words “Keep a Credit Card Number on file And Charge Later.” Turns out, this is because paypal and the people who blog about this sort of issue call it by the official merchant terminology: “authorization and capture.”

Now, if you Google “authorization and capture,” you’ll get a lot of pages. But you won’t be able to understand any of them. So I simplified it for you here.

Every paypal button comes with embeddable code. Whether you’re embedding a buy now button, a add to cart button, or even a subscription button, all you have to do is add one more parameter to the code. Here it is:

paymentaction=”authorization”

When you do, instead of making a transaction add to your paypal balance, paypal holds the money until you select “capture” from your paypal history list. If you have any questions, contact us at http://sparkah.com/website.php

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

You ask the best questions. Each one of you has a host of identical concerns. And you have concerns uniquely related to your business. To address both the most common and a range of unique demands, we created a complete feature comparison matrix between the most popular and well supported shopping carts including magento vs interspire.

Unfortunately, true to our nature, we went one step further. Not only did we elaborate on issues that you wouldn’t have thought of until later down the road, we’ve also explained the worst-case-scenario nightmares you may run into. These problems will blindside you. So we want you to know about them before moving forward with your ecommerce site. We also want you to know that we know about them – very well.

Dangers of Picking a Shopping Cart Without Throughly Analyzing Your Needs
Most executives don’t realize that picking a shopping cart is a complex and serious event. This is because once you’ve installed a cart for your e-commerce business, you are bound and stuck with the features and limitations of that software. Sure, you can make modifications and customizations but one tiny change can ripple through all 9,000 associated files. And yes, there are 9,000 associated files just to make it possible for your buyer to click “Add to Cart.”

This means that depending on whether your cart is based on PHP and CSS like Magento or if it’s a patchwork of PHP, CSS, and HTML TABLE throwbacks from earlier versions like OS Commerse, the cost to make a simple structural change can jump from $500 to $3,000 (respectively).

It’s literally like buying a car. If you have a large budget, you can walk up to the design department of Ferrari with your hand drawn design. If you don’t, you’ll have to pick a make, a model and finally, accessories. Then, if you want to make a structural change to your Corvette, it’ll require custom modifications.

Here’s the major caveat about customizing your shopping cart. If your programmer isn’t an experienced, anal, code Nazi (Yes. He must be a code Nazi), he will almost certainly leave loose ends that crash your installation. And you’ll hear about it on some random rainy Tuesday morning at 3:17 am while you’re on vacation.

As a general rule of thumb, cosmetic changes are simple and low risk. These include font, type size, letter and line spacing, and colors. Structural changes are moderately time consuming and can indeed have ripple effects that break other unimaginable parts of your site. These include moving blocks of content from one page to another, adding previews and snippets to the home page, etc. Functional changes are the most dangerous. Functional changes like returning customer memory based on cookies, modifying the “people who ordered this also ordered…” algorithm, and “Your Facebook friend Greg also ordered these…” features are the most demanding.

Most functional changes and modifications you want to see may already be available as “package function pluggins.” In other words, don’t pay for a functional modification if someone else already developed it as an open source module. There are two caveats here as well. If you figure out that you want a function after you’ve installed your selected shopping cart system but the “function pluggin” is available for every other cart but yours, you’ll have to custom build for that one function. And custom building one function can cost as much as just scrapping your entire cart and migrating over to another one. The second caveat: due to the complexity of these pluggins, if you went through the ordeal of migrating to another package just for that one little pluggin, you could find that the pluggin creates conflicts with other pluggins and crashes your entire cart. Again, you’ll hear about it on some random rainy Tuesday morning at 3:17 am while you’re on vacation.

Product / Features	Magento	osCommerce	Zen Cart	Interspire
cost	free / $3,000+ per year for pro version	free	free	$300 / $1000 for 50+ Products
support	pay (corporate)	broad (forums)	best (forums)	poor (corporate) reviews
customization	hard	fair	easy	fair
programming bulkiness	heavy	medium	lite	medium
license	corporate	open source	open source	corporate
minimum hosting cost (recommended)	$100/m	$25/m	$35/m	$50/m
age	young	old	medium	young
reporting	good	fair	fair	good
design friendliness	high	low	medium	high
code cleanness	high	low	medium	very high
documentation	good	poor	fair	good
customization friendliness	good	low	medium	medium
speed	poor	fast	fast	medium
order notification emails	yes	yes	yes	yes
customer memory for one touch reorder	no (yes, but still buggy)	no	no	yes
scheduled pre-orders	yes	no	not really	yes
customer management	yes	yes	yes	yes
product management	yes	yes	yes	yes
configurable payment and shipping modules	yes	yes	yes	yes
SSL option	yes	yes	yes	yes
coupon codes	yes	no	yes	yes
custom billing conditions based on location	yes	no	yes	yes
custom shipping conditions based on location	yes	yes	yes	yes
admin interface cleanness	good	fair	low	high
excel to database upload	yes	no	no	yes
SEO	yes	no	yes	yes

So what are your requirements? What does your ideal new home page look like in your mind? What do each of the main sections look like? What one function or feature would increase the number of items purchased per client; decrease shopping time; increase return frequency? Do you have a design sketch of each of the main page templates? Do you have a “wish list” of features?

If you want help planning and building your online store with the optimal shopping cart installed, call us at 310 598 1606 in NYC, DC, LA and Seattle. We’re here for you : Sparkah.com New Media Developers

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

If you’ve got fantastic products that will fly off of your shelves but don’t know how to setup a ecommerce website, this is your lucky day.

There aren’t many head to head comparisons between the three major ways you can create an online store. Did I mention, there are three major ways to create an online store?

eCommerce Shopping Carts / Features	ZenCart and OsCommerce	Paypal
Total Flexibility of Design Layout		Yes
Requirement for Design Modification	HTML; PHP	HTML
Hosting	Owner	Paypal
Additional Hosting Cost	Yes
Security	Owner Responsible	Paypal
Additional Security Cert Cost	Yes
Ideal for SKU Numbers	100+	1-150
Support and Maintenance	Experienced PHP	User / Owner / HTML
Auto Product Tagging and Grouping	Yes	(CMS required or simple HTML work)
Product and Pricing Change Authorization	Admin	Paypal Account Owner
Main Usability Differences	Both ZenCart and OsCommerce allows product tagging, simple price changes, inventory depreciation, and more features t available in paypal. However, for less than 100 items, and if quickbooks is used, ne of these features are necessary. Also, these cart systems requires that all content and web design need to be inside of the system. Paypal does t swallow the website	Paypal is the simplest and most secure shopping cart management system. Recently, they even added universal button changes where one control panel detail can be changed and instances of that “buy w” or “add to cart” button will be automatically modified. With Paypal, the ongoing cost of a 3rd party security certificate is unnecessary as all transactions happen on Paypals HTTPS servers. The biggest difference is that both ZenCart and OsCommerce require all changes including price and design to be done within their software. Paypal does t. Paypal works with any simple html page.

If you have any questions or need help building out your online store and driving traffic to you, feel free to contact me at http://twitter.com/journik or 310 598 1606 – Bob Wan Qi Kim

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary