Do I NEED a shopping cart?

[behindthecurve]

What follows are two copied posts from another cart forum that no one could answer. Any input would be appreciated. Shopping cars have SO many options I don't want or need and they all want me to add THEIR page of my products when I already have one. What I am trying to do is put a 'buy it now' button next to each item on my index page that goes straight to my payment gateway.

Greg

Post #1
I do NOT want to keep track of my customers and if they have to create an account and give information, they absolutely will run away screaming. My books are, shall we say, politically incorrect. So much so that we frequently get cash in the mail from people who don't believe in credit cards and don't want the paper trail that comes with a check. While I think their fears are misplaced, we all know the customer is always right.

I entertained the idea of just redirecting the paypal buttons to Transaction Central, but saw no way to prepopulate the fields. this meant the customer would have to fill in the amount and I would have to know what to send by only that, since the field TC has for 'reference' would have to have the item filled in it by them with no way for me to let them know this. (I could not modify 'reference'.) Also, if they wanted more than one book, the math was up to them and figuring out what they paid for was up to me. Shipping is not a problem since I always pay it.

Post #2
Too many clicks hurts sales. My customers did not want to go to a page with more info about a particular book to buy it. They came looking for something and if clicking on it from page one did not take them straight to buy it, they left without buying. I had the paypal buttons on the page dedicated to a particular book.They had to click the one they wanted, it took them to the page about that book where the buy it button was and they had to click again. Since I didn't sell much that way, I moved the buy it buttons to the first page and sales doubled.

If all I can accomplish with a shopping cart is to take them from my index page to another page of the exact same books to click yet again the results are predictable.
What would prevent me from just placing the code (the button) the shopping cart page uses to take the customer to the credit card fields on my index page?

[kobra]

Shopping cars have SO many options I don't want or need and they all want me to add THEIR page of my products when I already have one. What I am trying to do is put a 'buy it now' button next to each item on my index page that goes straight to my payment gateway.

Sounds like you need to code this for your page(s) and do not require a cart.

What would prevent me from just placing the code (the button) the shopping cart page uses to take the customer to the credit card fields on my index page?

For Zen Cart, security provided by sessions, and can not just use parts as it is controlled via sessions.

I do NOT want to keep track of my customers and if they have to create an account and give information, they absolutely will run away screaming.

How are you supposed to know where to deliver your products? This experience can be re-worded to what you want- i.e. instead of login or create account could be enter delivery details or??

They came looking for something and if clicking on it from page one did not take them straight to buy it, they left without buying

Is this your theory or how have you validated this assumption?

[behindthecurve]

Thanks for the response.

The way the paypal buttons worked was I got an email telling me what was paid for and where to send it.

Between Statcounter and Google anylitics I could tell when sales doubled while site traffic remained unchanged. Since the only difference was the buttons moving to page one, I thought it more than an assumption that I was seeing cause and effect.

I'm trying right now to learn enough code to prepopulate fields which I think would get me there but trial and error with test copies of my pages based on reading I'm doing at w3schools has me casting about for suggestions.

Greg