# paypal vs doing it yourself



## replay88 (Mar 6, 2007)

Im new to selling tshirts online, Im about to get my web site up, and was wondering how I should go about receiving payment and shipping to customer who place orders on my site. Or should I use a service like paypal to take care of receiving payments, etc....

Can anyone give me some ifo.

marco


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

You probably should setup a shopping cart like cubecart, zencart, oscommerce.

The shopping cart will link up to PayPal to let the customer pay after they are done shopping.

Although people do it, I wouldn't recommend _just_ using PayPal for the shopping cart.


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## replay88 (Mar 6, 2007)

What if I want to be able to do that myself, what does that entail. .. Can I process the CC# myself through paypal, but ship myself? is that feasable ?


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

replay88 said:


> What if I want to be able to do that myself, what does that entail. .. Can I process the CC# myself through paypal, but ship myself? is that feasable ?


Yes, that's how it works. 

You always do the shipping yourself unless you are using a fulfillment company.

Read this thread for a good breakdown of how it all works: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/ecommerce-site-design/t25617.html


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## rrc62 (Jun 2, 2007)

You can't process a customers card through paypal, the customer has to do it. To process cards yourself, you need a merchant account. I use a program called PC Charge on my laptop with an aircard, which lets me process a credit card anywhere via wireless internet. Very convenient for doing shows and fairs. 

I used Paypal as a shopping cart for a business site a couple years ago. It worked well. There was a "Buy Now" button beside each item. When pressed, it would add the quantity entered to the cart. I don't see anything wrong with that system. People trust Paypal as a secure way of doing business.


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## Jblack™ (Apr 7, 2006)

If you get PayPal's Virtual Terminal you can process customer's credit cards on your own. 

With paypal you open yourself up to too much risk though.


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## tcrowder (Apr 27, 2006)

Jblack™ said:


> With paypal you open yourself up to too much risk though.


I really think when a statement like this is made you need to back it up with information. I like many others have used paypal for years and never had any trouble. You make a statement like that with no facts to back it up and you look like someone with an axe to grind.


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## reddaisy (Jul 12, 2006)

I would be interested in more info on how PayPal buttons works....can customers buy more than one item? does it add them all up? how do you figure shipping costs?

I would also like to know what kind of trouble/problems others have experienced with PayPal...

Thanks to anyone who answers.


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## rrc62 (Jun 2, 2007)

There is a small bit of code that you copy from the paypal website that adds a "buy" button to your web page. You can add edit fields for quantity or just leave it hard coded for quantity = 1. When a customer hit the button, the item is added to their cart. When they decide to checkout, all of the items they have bought will be in their cart and totaled up. It works like any other shopping cart system. When I used it, I did free shipping on all items. That made things much easier. There is probably a way to incorporate a shipping calculator like the one eBay uses...Maybe even the same one, since Ebay owns Paypal. Poke around the business solutions section of paypal. You'll find all of this there...


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## Ken Styles (Mar 16, 2006)

I've used only paypal directly from my website into a paypal shopping cart with no problems. 
It's easy, fast and people know "paypal".

When you use Zen cart or those others, the customer usually has to "Sign up" to purchase a shirt and may end up not wanting to go through the hassle. You also have to know all sorts of special coding to get it to work properly.

With paypal there is not need to sign up and customers don't even need a paypal account to buy something from you. They can just put in their C.C. and shipping info just like a regular shopping cart. Also, there is very minial tweeking when it comes to setting it up on the back end using html codes and such.


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## reddaisy (Jul 12, 2006)

Thanks for the info! I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible....being a one-woman operation...and I'd like to spend more time on the creative side rather than the technical aspects (though I know they are very important).

Has anyone had any problems they could share? just to get a full picture...


thanks again!


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## sunshine byrd (Sep 13, 2007)

Hey am a newbie that works for a credit card in the fraud department Pay pal is a very secure site. Although sometime we do charge them back which means the merchant takes the hit (which would be us).Pay Pal will fight for you!! Its better for them to fight your battle then you going at it alone.. So just be careful with online orders if you get a 1000 tee-shirts going to Africa (which I’ve seen nothing against Africa but they currently have a very large fraud ring going on) it’s probably fraud. Don’t send it!!!


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## Sheepsalt (Sep 12, 2007)

Paypal has some bad history, but they have cleaned up their act and seem to be quite trustworthy at this point in time. There was a HUGE lawsuit against them for allegedly unjustly freezing accounts - some $14mil+ in total of account holders' money was reported frozen at that time. Since Paypal was not technically a bank, even though that's how it behaved, they did not have to follow the banking regulations and felt they could take such action (freeze accounts, close accounts, confiscate funds) without due process. If you left money sitting in your paypal account, it was at risk, period.

I believe that since ebay has taken over paypal allot of the issues have been resolved.

I know a few websites with details of this, but I'll send you to google - look for paypal lawsuit.

We use paypal AND our own merchant account to process credit cards. Our merchant account is through Intuit, because it links directly with Quickbooks, and that's what we use for our bookkeeping. Paypal's transaction fees are higher than the merchant account's transaction fees, but we use both for those customers who trust their credit card and bank account info to Paypal.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> Has anyone had any problems they could share? just to get a full picture...


Search the forums for PayPal and you'll find all kinds of posts where people have shared their experiences (both good and bad).


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