What’s the best way to setup an online store/shopping cart?
Most of you know I’m the producer of The WordPress Podcast. I’m currently redesigning the entire blog theme, and I’d like to begin to offer merchandise like t-shirts, ball caps, coffee mugs, etc. I’d also like to sell at least books, and possibly other items through Amazon.com.
For the t-shirts and coffee mugs I’ve settled on using Zazzle, because I don’t want to carry inventory or be responsible for shipping myself. If a listener wants 1 t-shirt of a certain size, Zazzle accepts the order, handles the payment, prints the t-shirt, ships it to the customer and sends me the profit… I don’t have to lift a finger. It does, however, mean that a dark t-shirt with printing on the front only, for example, costs $19.95/each. Add a 20% profit margin and it sells for $24.95, which is about $9.00 more than a comparable t-shirt purchased at Think Geek, Jinx, etc. Don’t get me started about printing on the back or sizes larger than XL. Alas, it’ll probably only sell to devoted listeners who don’t mind paying an extra $10 a shirt to show their support for the podcast, but it beats buying hundreds of t-shirts of every style and size, storing them, processing the orders, shipping… you get the picture.
I face other problems and concerns with dealing with Zazzle: When I link to the storefront I’ve created with them, I’m sending my customers/listeners offsite and beyond my tracking reach. I’ve sent them to a site that clearly appears different than my domain, and one that has branding all over it. Another concern is I cannot prevent them from altering the colors, or even the designs to suit their own whims. A third concern is not being able to limit any gift certificates I give away to my online store… they could use my substitute for cash to buy a Hannah Montana or an Barack Obama t-shirt. (I don’t mean to pick on Zazzle, I believe things things to be true of CafePress, Spreadshirt, et al.)
Add to the mix my desire to sell books such as WordPress for Dummies
Which is why I’m considering using a shopping cart system and designing a store that would be located within my domain and have my branding, yet go offsite to the appropriate vendor when an item or items are selected for purchase. The trouble is: I don’t know if this is a solution that works. Have you implemented something like this? Have you ever used OpenCart, a GPL v2 shopping cart I’m considering? (You’ve got to love free!)
I’d appreciate your help if you can offer any suggestions.
Comments
It all depends if the vendor has an API you can call to make the purchase and if that is somehow supported by the shopping cart software. Otherwise, you just end up sending them to that vendor’s interface at the end anyway.
It ends up being quite complicated because a visitor could be making purchases that have to come from multiple vendors. You would have to come up with a way to split the order out to each vendor, calculate shipping to each, and probably process multiple payments. It’s not pretty.
From a quick look at Zazzle’s API, it appears that all you can do is define a product and link over to them to complete the purchase. You might be out of luck integrating everything without actually stocking products.
FYI, You might also want to look at Magento, which is another open source cart, ( http://www.magentocommerce.com/ ) although I don’t think it will help the multiple-vendor situation either.
Actually if you have a spreadshirt shop you can set up google analytics for it to track your visitors through the shop and and limit your shop just to your own products. In addition you can fully customize the colors and fonts of your shop. so it’s actually very unlike zazzle or cafepress
I have had a small e-commerce site for 5 years now and I was using Frontpage. But I found an open source e-commerce software application called Zen Cart. It is awesome, I do carry stock because I am the creator of the “Peace the Old Fashioned Way” decal that you see running around Barksdale AFB. I am not sure how it would work with zazzle or cafepress, but I am going to find out. I hope this helps.
I use Zazzle exclusively, but am new to the game. I like the hands free production offered by Zazzle. I’ve built a site that isn’t very sophisticated but it works. Zazzle now offers a referral of 15% on any link-overs from your site so leads you generate for your site can still bring $$$ home. Zazzle offers many tools to build ones store but lacks a general overview and directions. Most of the tools I now use came after I jury rigged a system of my own. The Obama site will be deleted after the election and I will reissue the main site with a major overhaul based on Zazzles tools such as small medium and large Product image links.
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