I see several questions related to this in the archives, but they are all several years old. I’m kinda new to Sparkle, so please bear with me. Perhaps Sparkle has been improved to make things more cohesive?
I’ve been selling classic postage stamps on eBay but I’m quite tired of giving them over 29% of my sales for their pockets. I have my own Sparkle web site and am considering making it into an e-commerce site. I viewed the tutorial of how to set up payments and it looks pretty straightforward. However, I’m at a loss as to how to do a “shopping cart” thing with Sparkle 5 and PayPal. It works very well on the eBay site - is there a way to do it in Sparkle 5?
@K7TXA, the "shopping cart " is on PayPal’s end.
You can either use a BUY NOW button setup that takes your client straight to a checkout.
The other PayPal button you can use is ADD TO CART which you set up in your PayPal business account. By adding ADD TO CART buttons to your Sparkle website PayPal will automatically display a CHECKOUT button on your Sparkle website. Not in the Sparkle canvas but in Preview or on your server.
FF - YES, a gigantic help! I viewed the tutorial on doing Sparkle e-commerce, but either I missed something or it was prepared before that option was available. I’ve already got a personal PayPal account and will have to consider if I want to convert it to a business account or open a new one specifically for this venture.
Another thought about e-commerce - If I have an item for sale, someone puts it in their cart, checks out, and pays for the item, it is still there on my web page and someone else can come along and purchase a now non-existent item.How do you get around that without sitting at your computer 24x7?
This is where you will use something like Ecwid as Duncan suggested.
You would assign the number of stamps you have available for sale and Ecwid will count it down and when the last one is purchased the Ecwid store won’t allow any further purchase. You can also ask Ecwid to display “low stock” and then also “sold out”.
Yes the other way is to sit at your computer and manually place a sold out sticked on your product image.
Hi @K7TXA , if you have a look at one of my sites, sendmeyourcv.com, this uses the Ecwid plug in and works pretty well for the needs of the business, however, I am currently looking at alternatives as they have just recently increased their prices, almost doubling them. I would love to hear about any other alternatives.
Best regards
Simon.
You could try implementing the Stiva Shopping Cart into your site, from PHP Jabbers. Its a self hosted solution that requires a one-time payment, but it does do the job. It can use most payment gateways, but PayPal and Stripe appear to be the two built-in standard options. Other’s can be added at an extra charge. Once installed on your server. you maintain the shop via an administrator back-end. Incorporating the site into your sparkle project just involves copying code snippets from the administrator interface, and pasting them into embed objects in your sparkle pages.
I don’t remember how I chose Snipcart instead of Ecwid. I’m guessing maybe it was cheaper. But I’ve been using it for a couple of years. There are a couple of improvements I’d like them to have, but I’ve been satisfied with them. Like Ecwid, they offer inventory management behind their shopping cart. So I offer some class registrations that I don’t have a limit on. And I offer some tournament registrations that I have to cap at 20, and the shopping cart won’t accept any more entries after the limit is reached.
If you ever want to sell an item directly without the inventory management, I just posted a thread and I tried to explain step-by-step how to set it up using Stripe.
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