Online stores Options?

[gabster]

Hi Folks!

I know Tim is mentioning Yahoo Store, eBay Store, Google checkout and Paypal cart.

I was wondering if you who are using one of them could share some pro and cons on using these options.

I am trying to narrow them down to one that could operate the following situations:

A re-seller store that carries 2-3 products made each by different manufacturers. Which online store could handle one single checkout (on my store page) but automatically send the cash to the respective manufacturer's bought product?

In other words, just like Doug did with his prosoundeffects DVD sound libraries from different manufactureres.

The only difference is that I am trying to automate even the manufacturer payment - as opposed to Doug who had to do that himself...

Does this make any sense?

Thanks a lot!!!!

Gabi.

[TimW]

I know of no storefront that will send the "cash" to the manufacturer for you.

1. The storefront isn't the bank, and while you can give a merchant/payment gateway access to put money in, it's a completely different ball of wax to get money out.

2. The storefront wouldn't know how much to send, since I am assuming you would get paid more than you send to the manufacturer (called profit). It would take a fairly sophisticated system to take $100 and send $x to the manufacturer then deposit $y into your bank account.

3. No shopping cart manufacturer would ever want the liability involved if there were a glitch and you paid too much or too little. In fact, my shopping cart (independant and not Yahoo, but they work on the same prinicple) doesn't even deal with the money or credit authorization itself.

When a customer orders, Authorize.net (my merchant service) acts as the payment clearing house. Authorize.net tells my cart software that there is enough money (or not) in the account/credit line available so that the cart proceeds with the transaction.

When I ship the order, the cart tells Authorize.net that the item was shipped and the transaction finished, so please bill the customer's credit card for the amount. Authorize.net makes the charge and deposits the money in my account when it settles a couple days later. If there is a refund needed, I MANUALLY have to tell (authorize) Authorize.net to take the money from my account and credit it back to the cardholder. ONLY in the event of a charge-back (i.e. customer disputes the charge) or fraud can Authorize.net take money from my account w/o my initiating the transaction.

I'll need to re-read how Ferriss deals with this, because I am certain he has to both process the order from the customer side, AND send the purchase order to the manufacturer. As I recall, he discusses using online banking to pay for the merchandise, so that would indicate to me that Yahoo doesn't pay the manufacturer on his behalf.

I am certain you could pay someone to program the ability to pay the manufacturer, too, but in my opinion you WANT that control. Automatic payments would just be too variable in a business situation for this. You're trying to create a system that does everything for you with no intervention whatsoever. Not only do I believe that to be difficult to achieve, I also believe it to be a very bad idea.

TimW
Phoenix

[gabster]

Thanks Tim!

It makes lots of sense.

As of store options I am really pondering osCommerce with paypal payments pro integration. OsCommerce is a really nice feature, extensively customizable, etc.
I am a programmer by trade so I can easily find my way around the code (if needed).

I am curious to see (and I should maybe do this in a complete separate post) what would be your opinion on it. It is actually free (compared to Yahoo Stores), so all the percentage paid is the 2.9% fee for paypal's checkout.

thanks again!
Gabi.