HI Cass,
Glad to meet you. Well, about the PayPal cart, I have a few issues with it. First, it is a real "simple" cart, meaning it won't calculate the shipping rates.

So, I spoke to PayPal about letting them calculate shipping. They said they can't because the simple cart won't hold the memory of the transaction??. Long story short, It appears you will have to purchase a cart plug-in to get a full-function cart and have it work well. Or, go with more sophisticated stuff that is sometimes not handled here by WA servers. There are others here who have experienced that! I can't help you there. I looked at woo-commerce and that is a whole learning curve by itself...too much for me.

Now, you can set the simple cart to one amount added to cover shipping, it WILL do that. that could be ok for small items. But if it is a big item, then costs can vary quite a bit, so you have to set it on the higher end, and that makes sales difficult, because you have to charge more. But it works fine for that.

if you don't want to purchase a cart yet, one other thing you could do is to write up a product review, and calculate a shipping charge, and put it right into your price list. On small items it is fairly simple, like a set fee $3 shipping or whatever.
But for bigger items, shipping cross-country gets tricky, and expensive, and includes different areas of the country, and Canada.
I have concluded that it is much simpler to just use affiliates, and let them deal with all the hassles. Makes life simpler! Hope that helps?
Good Luck!
Chas

I agree with ya about the affiliate links. How much simpler could things get? The website I'm going to make though, is going to have to have a cart, because I am making the product that I am going to try to sell. At least it's small items, so shipping shouldn't be too bad. I was actually thinking of just adding a bit to my price to cover shipping, and saying "free shipping" on most items. People like free shipping, they don't have to know they are actually paying for it, eh? LOL. ...Only charging shipping when they wanted a rushed shipping, or more expensive option. I do want to keep the hosting at WA, especially since I have it payed for most of the rest of the year, it would only make sense to keep my sites here.

Does the cart only work with PayPal? I was thinking about figuring out how to accept other credit cards too. You're right, this is a headache, LOL. It's always good to learn new stuff though!

That is the beauty of paypal, they handle the credit cards, so you don't need to. Payments go thru them and right into your account. You need a paypal account set up, and you can run your business acct thru them
If it is your own products the you are shipping yourself, and you can just include/free shipping it will work fine. Then your website shows the visa, mastercard, emblems right on there. You have my website on the comment I left you go check it out, click on products..only have the two. I am going to go with affiliates, and put their products up eventually.Or look on my profile page for the bowling site. We are not permitted to shamelessly post our links like ads here.
Chas

Great! I have a PP account, so I'm half way there already! I saw the bowling ball cleaners. Are you making those? If not, then how come you don't have affiliate links to those? If your traffic is even 5 new people a day a manufacturer should be interested in making a deal with ya, I would think.

I stuck one in the cart, it looks awesome, I see what you mean about the credit card logos popping up. Is there a way to get a floating shopping cart icon, or one at the top of the page? If you had a bunch of pages with products it could get confusing to the shopper. Also, they might lose their cart if they went on and read an article. I know it's not hard to find again, but I also know how dim people can be!

Hi Cass,
Maybe i'll check the cleaner out....I don't think you will have a lot of options with the simple cart(free)..to get fancy you will need to buy a premium plug in. Go to the wordpress page and check that out, they aren't really that expensive. Download the free version, and check out the details, if its not what you want, then delete it. Hope that helps?
Chas

Sure does, thanks a bunch!

Hi Heidi
Thanks for you advice. I had a paypal account set up already, and the paypal credit card(not prepaid)but It allowed me to use it instead of a bank. I have since linked my bank in and have installed the wordpress simple shopping cart.
That is my first experience with a shopping cart, and it was very easy to do.It works fine, however there is one thing I found out.
If you need to use paypal for figuring your shipping costs, then you will need a paypal shopping cart. Why? Because paypal tells me that they don't hold the wp shopping cart in memory, so I just use a standard rate for shipping, and don't ask for paypal to figure the shipping for me.
I liked the reviews on the simple cart, and with 50,000 downloads, its reliable.
I did find the woocommerce plugin, and it really looks pretty nice.
Do you know if it is held in memory at paypal and shipping calculations word effectively? That would be my next choice then. I also saw it had over a million downloads! and it is also free!
Chas