E-commerce for beginners part one: Lily Rose Petunia

A friend of mine works in television as a director - which seems interesting to me - but he's recently developed an interest in web development - which seems odd to me.

He's also just formed a new band so he decided to set up an e-commerce site to sell CDs.  By his own admission he is a complete beginner to the field, although the end result looks impressive, so it struck me as a chance to carry out a highly unscientific poll of one to see what the public know about taking payments online.

He has a Mac and a copy of Adobe GoLive and opted for PayPal. I sent him a questionnaire.... 

Given you decided to sell CDs online, what drove your decision to go with PayPal?

I was familiar with PayPal and already had a basic account through buying
old tat off eBay. I knew that countless thousands of items were sold every
day. Sometimes transactions can go wrong; and it's great fun trawling the
'Bay reading the negative comments. But I've never heard of a problem being
the fault of PayPal.

Did you look at any other online payment offerings - for example those offered by banks?

To be honest I had no idea that banks offered such a service. Maybe they
should advertise. I hope they don't charge less than PayPal or I'll be well
gutted.

Was it important that you could take credit cards, as opposed to just Paypal payments?

Absolutely. If it was just PayPal payments I wouldn't have bothered. Also I
would be reluctant to use PayPal if you had to register with them just to
use the credit card. I believe this used to be the case. I wanted a simple
purchase process; no signing up with anyone, just type in your address and
credit card number and that's it.

How easy was it to integrate the payment stuff into your web site?

Not that easy actually. It helped that I had only one item at one price to
sell, so I only needed one Buy Now button and no shopping cart. They offered
up some code which creates my exclusive button for our CD and I was told to
just cut and paste it in. But there seemed to be a huge amount of code. I
was cutting it into a table using Adobe GoLive and it would destroy my page,
distorting the table way over to the right and somehow made images
disappear. I tried pasting it directly into my html and eventually by trial
and error found a place in the code where it would work. So now that's where
the button is on my page; it's not where I want it to be, it's where it
works.

Another thing is, PayPal doesn't work with Netscape 7. When I use that
browser as a customer I'm put through to the PayPal page where I should
enter my credit card details. I can see boxes, but there's no text telling
me what to write in them! I asked PayPal support for help, but I just got
one of those cut 'n paste replies from someone who obviously hadn't read my
question. Still, who uses Netscape 7 anyway? Not fans of
classically-influenced electronica I'm hoping...

Any other issues?

I asked our singer Sam to test the system by buying a CD. When she did I got
an email telling me a purchase had been made and where to send the CD, but
the automated email came from Sam and not PayPal. Sam's very uncomfortable
about this - that PayPal can send emails which purport to come from her. And what's the point anyway? It's an email from PayPal signed by the "PayPal Team" so why have they made it so that the email comes from the customer?

So I have some reservations, but I am glad that there is a service so that
I, an individual, not a company, can accept credit cards over the web.

So there you have it. On the whole a fairly painless process, certainly compared to my experiences of developing e-commerce sites using offerings from banks, but that's another story.

Lily Rose Petunia by The Vince Rogers Project is released on Monday 17th September and you can hear some MP3s now for free.