Mallmus and E-Commerce
Welcome back to The Blog.
Back in August '07 I was looking for a reliable e-commerce service but also something very flexible; I quickly found that the majority of the services were really overwhelming and cumbersome or just not easily modifiable.
We looked at Big Cartel, FatFreeCart, Magneto eCommerce and Shopify - all of which are great, but we wanted something that could be as seamless as possible; one of our aims was to ensure that the store's visitor gets submerged in the Herbal brand, and leaving the site would distract them, so the e-commecerce service we chose had to be fully customisable so we could hide any third-part logos and names.
Herbal Skateboards, a new local business, had to also keep in mind a budget too; and if the other e-commerce services offered a great package their pricing was too high.
Finally I came across FoxyCart, the web development orientated approach was there, and I always personally prefer to go with something open-source and independent than mainstream - so FoxyCart seemed like the one, but disaster strikes!
Mallmus and FoxyCart
The beginning phases of the Herbal Skateboards site were complete and it was down to the store to be built next, the new year was approaching and we wanted to have everything open by January.
The core structure of the store was pretty much complete, so we started implementing the FoxyCart functions into the sites backend - to our surprise, we discovered that FoxyCart isn't compatible with any UK payment gateways or banks.
Basically to use FoxyCart you like the service to a third-party payment checker, either your merchant hight-street bank account or an online service; this was going to be another fee which we had to take into account.
The Herbal client really wanted to use PayPal Payments Pro UK, but unfortunately FoxyCart didn't have any UK support for PayPal, so for the payment gateway we looked at: ModernBill, Authorize.net, World Pay, Protx and CDG Commerce - some of which were supported by FoxyCart in the UK at the time but more problems arose, for example, World Pay has a set-up fee of £200 - well out of budget for a payment gateway - We'd developed the store to work perfectly with the FoxyCart system, so to rewind and redevelop the store for another service would be too time consuming - so I got in touch with the FoxyCart team.
Brett and his team at Foxy had some more UK updates planned later down the line, the demand for Foxy in the UK wasn't high enough for immediate development - so things ground to a halt for the Herbal store.
A couple of months later Brett got back in touch and suggested that if we work with Foxy to beta test PayPal Payments Pro for the UK, get it up and running, then they'd work on it right away - and now PayPal UK is supported on FoxyCart.
PayPal Pro UK is relatively cheap compared to its competitors I mentioned above, on top of those transaction fees there's a £20/month payment, which only requires one sale and you've covered it - FoxyCart is only $15/month, which is about £7.5/month, so for about £27 per month we had a UK compatible fully customisable store running.
We can proudly announce that this week Herbal Skateboards have received their first customer in their store.
Epilogue
We're really tankful to the guys at FoxyCart, I know they made many exceptions to get the store running.
A final word on PayPal - I have never experienced such lousy customer services in my life - their UK support is near non-existent, for example, we'd call to enquire about some of their API functions, and not one of their technical support could answer anything, or the expert on that topic wasn't in that day - they never returned our calls, and one time before they'd resolved an issue they'd sent me a service questionnaire.
They also seem to be going through some migrations between American services, European services and the UK services, they all have interchangeable names, which are the same in some countries and different in others - trust me, whatever you do avoid delving into their code and functions.
Posted by Adam Wintle on July 11, 2008.