Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Help!!


I need help. I thought I could do it myself. But I don't think I can. Now thats not something you are going to hear me admit to often. Its this whole e-commerce website thing. I built myself a nice little website that I'm happy enough about. I'm sure it could be prettier, could be fancier, but those things can come later as The Painted Sheep grows. I'm okay with that. But this e-commerce bit, accepting credit card, deciding on a shopping cart and then figuring out how to use it....its all just a bit beyond me. Now, keep in mind that the website is supposed to be open for business on July 16th-- 1 day less than 2 weeks from now. What am I going to do? I guess I need to hire someone to do it for me but to be honest, I'm not making money off this yarn yet so funds are a little tight. Especially after seeing how high the fees for many of these shopping cart programs are! And as of yet I haven't found any web designers who are willing to accept yarn (or perhaps some soft, warm mittens) as payment.

If you know of anyone who does this, either as a hobby or professionally, and could point me in the right direction or just do it for me, for a reasonable fee, please let me know ASAP. Here is information they may need to know:
My product line contains about a dozen different items offered in about a dozen colors (so about 124 individual items). I use Quickbooks Pro as my accounting software and am signed up for their Merchant account. I currently have been experimenting with Netstores and I like how it interfaces with my website but have no idea if it will work with Quickbooks and, if so, how to make it work. I would love to be able to just stick buttons into the website I already have, if thats at all possible.


Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me...I'm feeling desperate and all of this computer confusion is really cutting into my dyeing and designing time and I really want to have a lot of yarn dyed and patterns ready for my grand opening in two weeks.


Update (7-5): I have decided to go with paypal for the time being. It doesn't do a lot of the fancy stuff (like interface with Quickbooks) that some of the other programs do- at least as far as I can tell--but its cheap and easy and will at least get me started. Looks like things will be good to go on July 16th!!

2 comments:

Julianna said...

Couldn't you just have people use Paypal?

Cass said...

I agree with Juli. I think most the knitbloggers who sell patterns on their websites use Paypal, so maybe it's not very difficult to use. Can't say from experience though...Good luck