Request for Site Beta Testers

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Millay

Thanks for the response, I agree with your thoughts on paypal, as I personally wouldnt use a site that uses pay pal as its payment gateway, although the site may be perfectly legitimate, you cant help but think there skimping on something when you see the pay pal logo... virtual stock is always scary, even though I say that as im about to go into using a drop shipping company for computer software... (ingram micro) anyone no any better drop shippers?

its interesting the comment you made about using the banks payment gateway, Barclays (one of my business accounts) is incredibly expensive, so we think it will be cheaper to get the merchant number through them and then use something liek secpay. for my software shop, im just about to phonew lloyds to se what they will charge me...

I hope i havent gone to

What do you mean expensive, it seems most of the cost is in the whacking great setup fees they all love to charge. HSBC for a providing merchant number only for Payment Service Provider purposes charged £100 setup / £20 a month and 2.2% credit 20p debit for transactions. We then had to pay £300 to Netbanx for integration, netbanx then charge us another 4-1% (dependant on monthly turnover) for the pleasure of being the payment gateway.

Company 2, entirely HSBC, Cost £200 setup similar charging structure, virtual terminal to log on and process manual transactions and tech support for integration into their payment gateway. No Netbanx charges.

Originally Posted by Graham

I looked at X-cart, but I wasn't happy with the cost for what I wanted.

Click Cart Pro is very affordable and has a free online discussion forum where you can get tech support from the programers or other users which is most useful.

There are a few bad (or, at least, less good) points to it, eg the documentation could do with work and when there's something you want to change it's not always easy to find which particular module it comes from, but they're fairly minor niggles.

Some of the stuff we sell has very complex pricing structures e.g. sample = £2, 25 = £150, 50= £200, this can be done in xcart, so that sold it to us. They also have forums to post qn's and also ask for code help (paid or unpaid), many programmers keep themselves employed doing coding work for forum posters.

Originally Posted by Graham

If you can get hold of Adobe Photoshop you can set up macros to batch re-size images which saves a hell of a lot of time!

What I did was to set up two macros to resize them to 400 x 400 for the main images, I needed two options because one would size them by height to 400 px (ie a portrait shaped image) and the other would do the same but by width, I then clicked on the appropriate options.

Each would then resize the "canvas" for the other dimension to 400 px wide or high so they all ended up in the right format.

It took about 5 minutes to resize a couple of hundred images that way!

You can do this on irfanview too, just getting to the end of this frustrating project. I should have the images into the database by the weekend.

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by SMHarman

PayPal will be fine, but most over 35s probably fall into the too much like hard work category.

Many under 35's too, and the loss of CCA protection is enough to put me off unless its for a small amount.

*Goes off to PM Graham for the URL as Mick's edit has intrigued me

Originally Posted by Graham

Ok, as requested by Mick, if anyone wants to help me out with the testing of the site, please can they drop me a PM and I'll give them the URL.

........[Snipped]

graham....... i just followed the link you pm'd me and i just got an ACCESS DENIED page Have i missed something since last night........ or has nanny patrol caught up with you and given you a damned good spanking

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by marina

graham....... i just followed the link you pm'd me and i just got an ACCESS DENIED page Have i missed something since last night........ or has nanny patrol caught up with you and given you a damned good spanking

drop the cgi-bin bit off the end so it is just /shop

Originally Posted by Millay

Out of interest how do you encrypt/collect credit card data from your site, not wishing you to comprimise your security are you encypting emails in pgp or something..

The cart has 128 bit encryption built in.

What happens is that, when you order, it e-mails me the order and a decrypt code, then I log into the site with webmaster authority to input the code and get the CC number.

Currently only the final page of the cart where the CC data is input is secured. There is an option to do the entire cart process encrypted which I may implement before it goes online.

Originally Posted by marina

graham....... i just followed the link you pm'd me and i just got an ACCESS DENIED page Have i missed something since last night........ or has nanny patrol caught up with you and given you a damned good spanking

Well since the site is registered with Net Nanny, it wasn't them!

If you still have problems, PM me and I'll send you the right one, but just visiting my site using the URL in my profile data and adding /shop/ should work.

And there haven't been any damned good spankings