Web page/site with paypal

[mabel88]

Hi all
Ok I have been a Mac user for 100 years and am just now doing a merchant site. The auction sites fees are getting to high and we are setting up on our own. I have searched and searched w/ no luck so far.

Up until now the most I can understand ( and do) are the ones like the free Google pages.
So I need it that simple..no fancy HTML jazz .

What I need is a super simple way to set up a site.. need several pages and a dozen categories of product/ pictures, a shopping cart type of thing and can take Paypal logo.

Its for collectibles/ antiques so loading photos, short descriptions, shipping .


* Does the Mac web sites have this kind of ability
* How do I get a Mac site
* Happy to look at all alternatives.

Many thanks in advance for all your patience with new questions that you answer many times.....have looked through the archives here and they all are too complicated for me.

Cheers
Mabel88

 

[lindsayanng]

You can copy and paste the paypal payment button onto any html based website.. But if you have a store with real inventory, you are going to want a shopping cart based website. Shopping carts run on php, and are VERY different from HTML.. but the LOOK of the site is still controlled by html.

Personally, my suggestion is to hire a designer to design the website and then teach you. This is what I do for lots of people who do SOME web design, but never wanted to get into php. I teach them where to look to change certain things and the ins and outs of ther shopping cart.

Doing it this way, you would end up getting a really nicely designed cart from a designer rather quickly, and then you can learn enough to make your own design changes.. When i started all i knew was html, and very little. So i was at the same level you are now. It took me about 1.5 years to fully learn the shopping cart software I am now using.. However, learning that script helped me to learn otherthings like wordpress and other shopping cart scripts a lot more easily and quickly because they all use php.

So OSCOMMERCE is by far, in my opinion, the most stable and flexible shopping cart software out there. With that you sign up for your own hosting account, install it, and then get to customizing it. You can do A LOT with that codebase, and there is a lot of addons that are already coded for you, but you need to know php to install them. Its not like the wordpress plugins that you just click to install.

So that is my suggestion. With oscommerce you get a customer's database where people can come back and buy and check their orders. You get completely control of your products - categories, images, descriptions, options, etc. All very easy to work on. Then you can also work on the orders and collect information like total sales per item, sales tax collected - etc.

So i'm sure that sounds extremely complicated.. so like i said, my suggestion is either hire a designer and get a fully customized website, or go with something like YAHOO STORES to get you started.