Adding commerce to your Website Tonight account. Part 2.

In part two of this article I suggest some ideas on how you can make the PayPal buttons / site integration more fluid for visitors of your site.

Please realize that this is a superficial look at what this, and other, payment services have to offer when used alongside WST. This is more of a primer on what you can do with WST when used as the basis for an online store, rather than a soup to nuts breakdown on E commerce for small business. (Then again if enough of you would like to see one, it could be fun to write.)

Selling multiple items at once.

In the first example I used a “buy now” button. That's pretty much a one-off and suited to those with only one product to offer or those that are willing to make and encrypt multiple buttons for each product.

If you have multiple products, it's time to look at the “Add to Cart” button. It's basically the same item which is placed the same way apart. When your shoppers add an item, they get the chance to continue shopping. If they don't find anything else that they like, they're going to need a way back. Be sure to add a View cart button too. For best results, place the view cart button so that it's visible throughout your entire site.

Tip 1

Another way to close the circle on the payment process and make it a seamless transition from your WST to PayPal and back again is to create two pages to accommodate PayPal’s button redirect.

These pages will be used for a successful payment and a canceled order screen respectively. You can thank the shopper in the first and maybe add in a survey or feedback form in the latter, in order to see why they wanted to back out of the purchase. There are some conditions on how these pages have to be formatted when using PayPal, so please adhere to their requests if you go this route.

Tip 2

Edit the PayPal shopping cart to match your WST Site. You have to do this within your PayPal account but you can match the look and feel of the cart to your site. If you use an image within this design, it’s recommended that you  link from a photo stored on a service that allows secure (https) images. Such as our Online Photo Filer which you may already have free with your domain.

Without an https link to the image, most browsers that try to display a site with a mix of secure ( https) and insecure ( http) elements will pop up a warning telling people that not everything on the site is secure. It may only be an image, but it’s your image that suffers in the minds of those that don’t understand the mild nature of the warning and they will choose to go elsewhere.

Tip 3

Create a template for your products. Before you even add products, work out all the common items such as Price, shipping, and color, and then copy and paste the code into new content blocks.

Well that’s the basics of starting a store with your Website Tonight program. As I’ve said, this is merely scratching the surface. So, if there’s any question arising from this, let me know and we’ll address them in a future entry.

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