SET UP A FREE SHOPPING CART AT PAY PAL

Selling anything online requires a shopping cart of some sort. There are many ways to do a shopping cart. Your web hosting company (I use GoDaddy- they always answer the phone when I call and no long wait!) should offer a cart for a fee. There are also several web companies that offer shopping carts....BUT. . . .

If you're willing to put a little work into it Pay Pal offers a free shopping cart solution for you. You must set up an account with them and that's not really fun, you have to fill out a bunch of forms, get all your bank information lined up, allow them to verify your bank account blah, blah, blah. But once this is all done you can then go into your account and use their merchant services to build your own shopping cart.

You will need to have some familiarity with html code so you'll feel comfortable inserting the code required. (And there are a lot of free html tutorials online as well as CSS for those of you who want to spend the time learning.)

You can create "Add to Cart", "Buy Now" "View Cart" even "Donate" buttons with their button wizard. You put in your information - product name, price, optional product code and you can even set up shipping and tax procedures. Then they give you a code that you paste into whichever web page you set up for that product.

These buttons when clicked take your buyer to Pay Pal to purchase. They pay Pay Pal and Pay Pal pays you, minus a small fee for processing a sale. You pay nothing until you've made a sale.

Pay Pal can take all forms of payment from your buyer. They handle the financial transactions so you are not forced to deal with any of that, worry over security or keep track of transactions. Pay Pal does it all for you for that small fee. And that fee is usually lower than what your merchant account charges to process a credit card sale for you.

Additionally, you can set up a merchant account with Pay Pal that will allow you to take and process credit cards offline - like at your art show. You have to go through a lot more forms and applications and that service is not free but it is available.

So, check out Pay Pal's services and see what you think. Remember, I'm not recommending anything for you just giving you information and resources to make up your own mind. There, that should satisfy the legal mumbo jumbo.

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