money order and cheque payments - please help

[mazer]

I currently have a paypal shopping cart on my web site but I cant take orders from people who want to pay by cheque or money order, can anyone advise on what to do?

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Mazer, Welcome to UKBF.

Firstly you need to check the links on your homepage - half of them don't work - well actually they do but the way you've structured your hyperlink it redirects to business.gov website.

The other half my browser hangs on.

I would recommend you get yourself a web designer to tidy this up for you - would only take an hour or two to get it looking alot better.

Then you could get a basic shopping cart system in place from around free to £150 for a basic system.

Again I'd get a web designer on board to save yourself alot of time and heartache.

Theres quite a few web designers on the forums - or give me a shout.

Hope this helps,

Rob

[mazer]

Hi Rob
I actually hired a web designers to do the site, but they have really let me down, they said that I would be able to take orders from people that wanted to pay by money orders or cheques but when I looked at the cart they didnt even add the postage to the cart and when he re-done it, it looked like an amature had done it, also the links on the home page were suppose to have buttons instead of text links which look terrible. With my budget I am unable to do anything with it for a while, so if you know any sites where I can learn about the oscommerce cart myself I would really appreciate it if you could tell me about them. Also can you tell me anything about ASP pages? are they better than hotmail pages? Most of the site is designed using ASP pages but they seem to be very slow.
Thanks for replying to my post.
Regards
Paul

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Paul,

Firstly if your web designers have gone back on a deal or not supplied what you thought you were purchasing thats one issue.

osCommerce http://www.oscommerce.com/ is a php based application NOT asp - basically for simplicity you use one or the other. You mention hotmail pages - what do you mean by this?

ASP is fine as a scripting language - the speed of the pages will ultimately be determined by the server specifications, the servers connection to the internet, the internet backbone the hosting company uses, your ISP, your broadband connection and your PC (phew what a mouthful) - in a nutshell the script in itself is probably ok ;)

osCommerce is free, installing it is free except for the hosting account (we offer a one click install on oscommerce - it's already installed on our servers). Tweaking it yourself is free. You can buy templates that are not free: http://www.matrixxhosting.com/oscommerce-templates.shtml but thats not really necessary if you have a little time to spare!

Hope this helps,

Rob

[mazer]

Hi Rob
Can I use the design that I have on my web site now with osCommerce, or does it limit your design to templates, also my whole site was designed with ASP pages and I was wondering if osCommmerce was compatible with ASP because its PHP, will I have to get the site re-deigned? Also do you know if it possible to use a Microsoft Access database with osCommerce?

[MinuWeb]

osCommerce needs to be on a server running PHP & MySQL databases, you can customise it to look like your current site but it won't be 100% the same as what you have now.

[mazer]

Could I use Mals ecommerce cart? and keep the same design?

[MinuWeb]

With most shopping carts you will be able to get almost the same as you have now, there will just be a few small differences due to the way the various carts work.

I mean, really you only have a black background, and an "add to cart" option so it wouldn't be that hard.

[Rob Holmes]

Could I use Mals ecommerce cart? and keep the same design?

Well we've installed mals-e on a few sites and the purchase information (description, price, shipping etc) is generally built into a hyperlink on each product. With a bit of coding you could get it working the same but I think it would be more hassle and expense than it's worth as you'd need a whole 'back-end' upload system to the site to create the database etc.

With mals-e you don't need the database!

Rob