Shopping Around for Shopping Carts
So today I played around a bit with the shopping cart setup.
I decided to use ejunkie as the shopping cart, and PayPal as the payment processor. I’ve used PayPal on previous websites and have been happy so far. I’ve never used ejunkie before, but I’ve seen it used on many websites.
One thing I see being an issue is that users may not see they can easily pay with a credit card instead of a PayPal account. If you’ve never used PayPal when purchasing, they give you the option of signing in or using a credit card. But the credit card button is not obvious, as it says something along the lines of, “Pay As a Guest” or something. Because this may be an issue, I may upgrade to the $30 a month Pro version which makes credit card payments much easier. But for now, I’m sticking with the standard one.
Custom Orders
I’ve run into a slight issue with my idea. If you look at my offer, I promise to create a website from a StudioPress template. I need the customer to provide the copy and the images they’d like. I could have a phone interview with every customer, but I don’t think the customer would appreciate the fact that they are paying me upfront and trusting that I will call them. It may seem like a scam.
Therefore, I want the customer to be able to send me their images and text BEFORE paying, or, at the very least, right after paying. But I’m not sure the best way to do this.
If they send me the information AFTER, I’m thinking of using Gravity Forms to create a place for them to enter all the text and upload the images. Obviously, I’ll have a demo site that will show where certain entries will go. For instance, there’ll be a form entry for “Page 4 Content Area,” and that text will go in the “Page 4 Content Area” as listed on the demo site.
If they send the information BEFORE, how do I know they paid? I’m sure there is an easy fix, like asking for confirmation number. In an ideal world, the form would be part of their payment information. But that might get complicated. I plan on testing this out tomorrow.
Sales Page
I also did some more work on my sales page. You may or may not notice I’ve used Premise to create it. As this is my first sales page, I’m following Premise’s template and layout to determine what to place where. It’s still rather rough, so I’ll have to play around with it a bunch more.
Today, I added all the image elements as well as all the text below the pricing boxes.
I still want to go through and do some bolding to emphasize certain elements.
Prelaunch Content
I’ve done a bunch of work with my prelaunch content already. You can see that here.
Basically, I’m appealing to business owners who don’t have a website yet and don’t want to spend a lot of money. I’m creating a simple guide to show them how to make a free website on WordPress.com. I’m offering the guide for free in exchange for an email address.
I don’t have the guide created yet though. I did it kind of backwards. I created the landing page with all the promises of the guide, and then I’ll create the guide. It may seem a strange way to do it, but it works. It’s pretty much my way of doing an outline for my guide. Now I know exactly what to write in my guide.
On the prelaunch page, I’m again using Premise. I’m also using Aweber for the email list and used Killer Ecover Scripts with Photoshop to create the little image of my guide.
That’s pretty much it for today. Now I’m off to celebrate St. Patrick’s day.
If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below.
