I started this e-commerce series on my blog with only a vague idea of how it would all come together. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot along the way. I had this crazy idea that Zoho Creator could be used to create an online catalog of products or services to embed in your Web site, which led me to try experimenting with using this same idea to automatically create the appropriate PayPal codes for every product entered into the catalog. The idea sounded great, but I had to delve deep into the Zoho Creator and PayPal codes to try to make it all work.

Although it took me a long time to get everything working the way I wanted it to, I think it was worth the effort. I’ve had some great feedback from my readers about this series, even from the Zoho Creator team! I appreciate all of the support you’ve shown me.

One of the comments I received was from Pete Thomas, author of the ShareTactics and Land of ZC blogs. Share Tactics explores how technology and the Web are changing the way we live and work. Pete has dedicated his Land of ZC blog to “all things Zoho Creatorish,” and he has an amazing collection of ideas for what people can do with Zoho Creator. His work goes into far greater depth than anything I’ve been able to do. His blog really pushes the limits of Zoho Creator, covering topics such as:

• Creating a hyperlink directly to an editable version of a single record within your application. This can be very useful if you are using Zoho Creator to generate registrations for individual users, or need the ability to allow users without Zoho accounts to edit records in a private application.
• Encrypting Zoho Creator Data. This is a nice way to ensure that a publicly-available application can only be viewed by authorized users, or on a Web site that you control. Because public applications are indexed by search engines, this is a nice way to protect the private information people may submit in your forms.
• Backup your Zoho Creator data to Dabble DB. Sad to say, this is something I never even considered when I started building my online catalog. While it’s not a problem for me (since I currently only sell one item), this is very useful information for anyone who plans on creating a large catalog (or any other application) with Zoho Creator.

In addition to these and many other useful posts, Pete has also taken it upon himself to interview the Zoho Creator team to find out what makes them (and Zoho) tick. I will be using the Land of ZC and ShareTactics blogs a great deal as I explore new ideas for building a dynamic Web presence on a “limited” (read, nonexistent) budget.

So, while you sit back and watch the money roll in from your online store (hopefully), you might be wondering where we go from here? To be honest, I haven’t made a final decision, but I have several ideas in the hopper. I’ll be taking next week off for Labor Day, so that will buy me a little time. I think, however, that I’ll probably start a new series on creating enhancements for your Web site. I’ll use Zoho Creator for many of these enhancements, so it might not be a bad idea to go over them now, while we’re all in the Zoho Creator mood.

Most of the enhancements I’m working on are built to provide workarounds for the deficiencies with Microsoft Office Live Basics (MOLB). If you were with me earlier this summer, I mentioned that anyone could register a domain name and start their own personal or business Web site absolutely free, thanks to this new service from Microsoft. Unfortunately, however, there’s not much you can do with the site using the tools available, aside from just creating a Web site with a variety of different pages. However, the free domain name registration, free Web hosting, and free slew of e-mail addresses offered definitely make the service worthwhile. But I wanted to build more interactivity into the site, as well as to create more dynamic content. I have several ideas in mind, which I’ll explain in detail in the next few posts. One of my ideas is to create your own Content Management system. For example, you could have one page (details.aspx for example) that would display any details you specify, depending on the attributes you provide. While the structure of the page would remain unchanged, the information displayed would be different for details.apsx?page=27 than for details.aspx?page=4. Another (very similar) idea is to create shortcut URLs for your site. Rather than point someone to http://lockworldherald.com/documents/catalog.aspx, I can point them to http://lockworldherald.com/?page=catalog. There are two primary benefits to this. One is, obviously, to shorten the URL (especially if you are linking to pages outside your site with longer URLs). The other benefit is the ability to create multiple shortcuts pointing to the same destination. For example, I could also point people to http://lockworldherald.com/?page=products, which would take them to the same destination as page=catalog. Also, rather than editing the information on a static Web page, you could create one (or many) Zoho Creator applications to hold the specific content for you. Instead of editing the whole page, you could edit portions of the content individually. This series will make use of another great Zoho Creator feature—JSON scripts, which allow you to access the data in your applications via JavaScript. Ultimately, I’d like to find ways to practically build your site as a single page that could serve up different content based on these attributes. Although I’m not quite there yet, I am very close.

That’s all for today. Thanks again to everyone for showing such interest in and support for this blog! I look forward to starting the next series after Labor Day.

---

Brought to you by Lockworld Herald.

---

If you’ve been following along with this e-commerce series, you now know how to sign up for a free PayPal account to be able to receive online payments, create an online catalog of products/services, and provide your customers with more information by creating product detail pages. So if you are ready to start an online business, you have everything you need to get started.

However, since everyone’s situation is different, the steps outlined in my previous posts may not work for all of your needs. In this post, I want to introduce you to a few optional ideas or services that can be used to enhance your catalog.

Additional Checkout Options

Google Checkout:

Google recently launched its own online checkout service to allow people to sell items from their Web sites. Much like PayPal, sellers can create an account to allow people to purchase items from their Web site via Google Checkout. The principal difference between Google Checkout and PayPal (In my opinion) is that only people who have a Google Checkout account can make purchases this way. There is no option for people to use their own credit card without an online account. On the other hand, it seems fairly easy to sign up for an account using a major credit card, so I can’t say for sure how much of a hindrance this would be for shoppers.

As with PayPal, sellers can build HTML snippets to embed into their sites to produce a Google Checkout “Buy Now” button. This script can be configured much like the PayPal snippets. I’ve included a sample below (Items shown in red will need to be customized to your account/needs):

<form action=”https://checkout.google.com/cws/v2/Merchant/{Your Merchant ID}/checkoutForm” id=”BB_BuyButtonForm” method=”post” name=”BB_BuyButtonForm”>
<input name=”item_name_1″ type=”hidden” value=”{Item Name}“/>
<input name=”item_description_1″ type=”hidden” value=”"/>
<input name=”item_quantity_1″ type=”hidden” value=”1″/>
<input name=”item_price_1″ type=”hidden” value=”{Price}“/>
<input name=”item_currency_1″ type=”hidden” value=”USD”/>
<input name=”_charset_” type=”hidden” value=”utf-8″/>
<input alt=”" src=”https://checkout.google.com/buttons/buy.gif?merchant_id={Your Merchant ID}&w=117&h=48&style=white&variant=text&loc=en_US” type=”image”/>
</form>

You can use Zoho Creator to customize this script as I described in E-commerce Step 2 of 4. Although there is no way for non-Google Checkout users to pay this way, it might be a nice option to include if many of your customers do have a Google Checkout account, or if you want to encourage them to create an account.

Mercantec E-Commerce Express:

While searching for ways to build a shopping cart to use with my PayPal account, I ran across a fantastic service from Mercantec — E-commerce Express. This service is completely free of charge, and allows you to generate a list of products/services to sell on your site. You can generate add-to-cart buttons for each item using short JavaScript codes that can be included in your Web pages for each item. In addition, you can create JavaScript codes that will allow you to embed the users’ shopping cart items directly into your own Web page, and even a script that shows the user how many items are in their cart (useful at the top of your catalog/product detail pages). In fact, E-commerce Express is much easier to use than PayPal. If you want to change the price of a product, or your shipping charges, you can do so directly through your Mercantec account and you don’t have to create new JavaScript codes – the prices of your products are updated automatically (PayPal requires you to re-create the HTML codes for your products if you change a price, which is what prompted me to start using Zoho Creator in the first place).

I found only one disadvantage to Mercantec’s E-commerce Express service…Your shoppers must have either a PayPal or a Google Checkout account to make a purchase. I did not see any options for people to simply pay via a credit card. For this reason, I chose to stick with Zoho Creator for my catalog.

However, if you can live with this (If you are confident that most of your potential buyers will have either a Google Checkout or a PayPal account), Mercantec E-commerce Express is a fabulous service to use. In addition, if you’re unwilling to go into the scripting details that I have done, E-commerce Express may be a viable alternative. Please note, however, that you will have to configure E-commerce Express to allow the service to access your PayPal and/or Google Checkout accounts. Fortunately, Mercantec provides detailed instructions (once logged in to your account) to walk you through the process.

Special Items

If you have special items in your catalog (such as files available for immediate download), you may need to create a few exceptions to the automatically-generated PayPal/Google Checkout fields in your Zoho Creator application. This can easily be done by adding a new field that can hold any customized PayPal/Google Checkout codes you need. Then, in the script for the catalog, you can just add an if/then statement something like the following:

if(input.PayPalOverride != “”)
{
PayPal=input.PayPalOverride;
}
else
{
input.PayPal=”<form method=’post’ action=’https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr’ target=’_blank’><input type=’hidden’ name=’cmd’ value=’_cart’><input type=’hidden’ name=’add’ value=’1′><input type=’hidden’ name=’business’ value=’” + input.Seller_s_e_mail + “‘>”;
input.PayPal=input.PayPal + “<input type=’hidden’ name=’item_name’ value=’” + input.Item_name + “‘><input type=’hidden’ name=’item_number’ value=’” + input.Item_number + “‘><input type=’hidden’ name=’amount’ value=’” + input.Item_price + “‘><input type=’hidden’ name=’shipping’ value=’” + input.Shipping + “‘><input type=’hidden’ name=’shipping2′ value=’” + input.Shipping2 + “‘>”;
input.PayPal=input.PayPal + ” <input type=’hidden’ name=’handling’ value=’” + input.Handling + “‘><input type=’hidden’ name=’currency_code’ value=’USD’><input type=’hidden’ name=’undefined_quantity’ value=’1′>”;
input.PayPal=input.PayPal + “<input type=’image’ src=’http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif’ border=’0′ name=’submit’ width=’87′ height=’23′ alt=’Make payments with PayPal – it is fast, free and secure!’></form>”;
}

Managing your money

If you are selling items that need to be shipped (as opposed to downloaded software), it will be essential for you to maintain good records to ensure your customers stay happy. Both PayPal and Google Checkout have some built-in functionality that will allow you to track orders. I have not personally sold anything through my online catalog (Hard to believe, I know, since I have only one item available for sale, and it can be downloaded free of charge elsewhere!). From reading the documentation, it sounds like Google Checkout has a more robust set of management tools available. However, I feel that PayPal remains the best option because it allows non-account-holders to make a purchase with a major credit card.

If you feel the need to maintain more accurate or more thorough records, however, you may want to try out some other services. Microsoft offers a free accounting software package named Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007. This free software package requires both .Net Framework 2.0 and MySQL to function, both of which are available free and can be installed during the Accounting Express installation. Essentially, the software can provide you with all of the tools you need to start a small business to track expenses, manage clients, and generate reports. I found it to be much more than I need for my “practice” catalog, so I haven’t delved deeply into the functionality yet, but I did notice that you can synchronize Accounting Express with your PayPal records. Unfortunately, you have to do this manually by downloading your PayPal records and then importing them into Accounting Express. But, if you really need all the tools, you can’t beat the price!

Alternatively, Zoho CRM offers you the ability to manage sales orders and/or create invoices (for people who want a product, but don’t want to order online). I have not used Zoho’s CRM solution yet, so I can’t tell you much about how it stacks up against PayPal or Google’s integrated order management systems or against Accounting Express 2007.

That’s all for today, and that wraps up this e-commerce series. I want to thank everyone for their comments about my idea to combine Microsoft Office Live Basics, Zoho Creator, and PayPal to build a completely free e-commerce solution for individuals or small home-based businesses. While researching this topic, I ran across several related sites and ideas. In my next post, I’ll try to summarize what we’ve done over the last few weeks as well as share some of the ideas and resources that I’ve come across while writing this blog.

---

Brought to you by Lockworld Herald.

---