Media Lab Forums

spearheadmm · Joined: 12 Oct 2009 Posts: 39

Not sure if this is the proper venue. I've had a hard time finding a third party shopping cart that will allow and/or meet the criteria for an on line cigar store. Any suggestions would be helpful. Been the PayPal Pro and 1shoppingcart.com route already.

Matt Jensen · Media Lab Support Joined: 17 May 2010 Posts: 411

What criteria need to be met? We have our partner, Foxycart which is a very capable shopping cart provider. You can use PayPal or other payment gateways with it as well.

Here are the features of Foxycart:
http://www.foxycart.com/features-of-web-20-seo-ecommerce.html
If you're creating your site with SiteGrinder to utilize Foxycart in your SG design, you will need to have the Commerce add-on:

Let us know what you're looking for exactly, and either a user might know the best solution or we can help out with that.

spearheadmm · Joined: 12 Oct 2009 Posts: 39

I have an email in to Foxycart and am on their forum looking for anyone who's done a cigar site.
They seem to be a bit unorganized, seeming to not have any real support available.

Matt Jensen · Media Lab Support Joined: 17 May 2010 Posts: 411

I don't know if there are any restrictions being an online vendor of Cigars, but when you create your site in SiteGrinder, you will be able to attach pricing, information, etc from the Metadata of the product photo. With Foxycart, they can seamlessly add more items to their cart or apply coupon codes, or whatever else you need to do with the cart.
So design wise on your cart, you're not really limited, but as for restrictions for selling cigars online, that may be another story that I don't know.

sportster55 · Joined: 28 Apr 2010 Posts: 42 Location: Prescott, AZ

While you are on the subject of Foxycart and non contemporary uses, how easy would it be to utilize it for accepting team registration payments for entry into sports event? I will get on their website and poke around but I was just curious if someone wanted to leverage the ecommerce module of SG3 for something other than material goods, but rather a team that wishes to enter their kids into a soccer tournament by paying online, is this conceivable with Foxycart?

Chris Perkins · Site Admin Joined: 29 Sep 2005 Posts: 5665

If it is just accepting money, I don't see why not. We used to use FoxyCart to sell our softwares.

SiteGrinder 3.1 also has direct PayPal Standard support. That's less featureful than FoxyCart, but cheaper.

spearheadmm · Joined: 12 Oct 2009 Posts: 39

Thanks for all of the input. You are all very helpful. First of all, everyone should know selling cigars online is NOT like anything else. PayPal doesn't approve of it and very few Merchant gateways will do it. Foxycart has been approved based on citizencigars.com and we will be using them to recreate the shopping cart links on our site. I'm happy to say.

foxycart_brett · Joined: 10 Sep 2010 Posts: 4

spearheadmm · Joined: 12 Oct 2009 Posts: 39

My initial impression was formed by clicking on the Contact Us link under support and reading this: Our full contact form is coming soon, so in the meantime please use the mini contact form to the right.

We’d love to chat on the phone, but because there are only so many hours in the day, we’d prefer to communicate by email. If you’d like a phone call for a specific reason, please contact us with your request and a good time to call you back. We love to talk on the phone, but we also love adding new features.

In your defense, I was responded to quickly with support acknowledging they were following my posts here. Upon the approval of the merchant services company based on the citizencigars.com example, I have begun to create a shopping cart for this site.
The videos are very informative and the detailed instructions are done very well.
Having said that, I can honestly say I am happy with what I've seen with Foxycart and will begin to use it with future ecommerce clients.

I have 2 wishes though: An affiliate program would be nice to have. I receive commissions from my previous shopping cart provider OR a Dealer account which would allow me to bill my clients directly for it.

MediaLab needs to put a PSD example of a checkout page on the wiki. I don't have the time to go through a 1.5 hour webinar as I'm under the gun with this client.
Not your fault mine. Apologies for the long post, thank you all again for your valuable assistance.