Top Flight — April 2008 | Issue 35

Sell online with a FREE Ecommerce Shopping Cart for Business

By Barbara Zaccone

If you have a handful of products to sell online and don't require the bells and whistles of a sophisticated ecommerce solution than perhaps you should consider PayPal's FREE ecommerce solution. The PayPal solution integrates basic shopping cart functions with a payment gateway and merchant account. Funds can be paid to you via check or through direct deposit. PayPal is a low-cost alternative to break into the world of ecommerce.

With the PayPal shopping cart, your buyer will be able to purchase multiple items with a single payment. Your customers do not need a PayPal account to checkout and all major credit cards are accepted. It is ideal for authors to sell books, non-profits to collect donations, manufacturers to sell samples, and businesses who have a small amount of products to sell.

You only pay a small percentage of each sale and there are no monthly fees or setup costs, plus you receive free fraud protection. That means no chargeback fees to worry about.

PayPal Merchant Fees

  • Discount rate (percentage of transaction fee): 1.9-2.9%
  • Transaction cost (fixed fee): $0.30/transaction
  • PayPal setup fee: none
  • Gateway transaction fee: none
  • Gateway fee: none

If you would like to see an example of how BZA has integrated PayPal shopping cart into one of our client's web sites, check out http://www.soapstones.com/shop.html If you would like to discuss how this solution can help your business, please contact us at info@bza.com.

BZA Designs Web Site for Winans-McShane

BZA recently launched a new web site for Winans-McShane Enterprises located at www.winansmcshane.com. The company, headquartered in East Brunswick, has been providing packaging, janitorial, plastics and maintenance supplies for over 100 years. The corporate web site contains product as well as company information along with a section with downloadable forms. The client also needed the site to display Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for the various products they sell.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration require that MSDS be available to employees for potentially harmful substances handled in the workplace under the Hazard Communication regulation. Winans-McShane wanted to make this information conveniently available on-line to their customers. BZA built a custom web application that displays the appropriate MSDS sheets based upon what the user selects. We also built a backend administrative area where the client can maintain the database of companies, products and PDF files. This application was constructed using the PHP programming language and the MySQL database system. The site can be visited at www.winansmcshane.com.

News

Zaccone to Attend Annual NJAWBO Conference

Barbara Zaccone will be attending the 2008 Annual Conference and Expo on May 7-8 at the Ocean Place Resort and Spa in Long Branch, New Jersey. This year’s conference celebrates NJAWBO’s 30th anniversary serving the women business owners of New Jersey. For more information visit http://www.njawbo.org.

Gas Prices May Compel Many Consumers to Shop online

According to a recent Harris Interactive survey, 61% of online consumers cite the ability to shop at any hour as a reason to make a purchase online rather than in a retail store, while 57% cite free shipping and 51% lower prices. The price of gas is also emerging as a reason to shop via the web: 33% of those surveyed cite the rising cost of gasoline as reason they’d shop online.

The survey of 2,363 U.S. adults was conducted online April 7-9, 2008.