minimal payment information?

[Certainly confused]

hello all I have a topic that I really have no idea about i'm a sure fire Zencart newbie But here goes:
I am hoping to open a zen cart that would allow the purchase of penny ad space... A person checks out the available ad space on the site and orders that specific square :-) but I am super sure I won't need any shipping info or personal info from potential customers. And when it comes to paypal each person should be able to pay directly from their funds since it's only between a penny or 10 cents???

(1) Can I change the payment module for credit cards, or change the payments method attributes of to accept an email address instead?

(2) Would it be a possibility to create a zencart payment module with only the fields for a first name, Email, and a field for the input of a verified paypal email.? after all of this info is entered the customers order is place, i see it and can then go into my paypal account and request the payment amount manually, Ex:as if I were asking a friend for a penny or the 10 cents?

I know the current available modules are much more convenient, but I would like to wait until i'm sure anyone will bite at my service before upgrading to a more professional paypal account, I have no way of knowing my potential profits??? But a personal paypal account has a $500 limit per month, I doubt if I had an sales that I would make over $5 I hope I covered all of my questions and that it made sense.

p.s. my zencart info is : Zen Cart 1.3.8a
Patch: 1::
Database Patch Level: 1.3.8

Thank You,

A lost Zenner

[DrByte]

Using a credit card merchant account or a PayPal premier/business account (and a premier or business account is required if you're going to use shopping cart software to handle your transactions) will cause you to incur transaction fees, which are typically a minimum of 30 cents per transaction (depending on various factors), plus a percentage of the transaction (again this varies). Thus unless you're charging an amount more than the minimum cost levied to you on such transactions, the only one making any money will be the payment service you're using ... not you.

I think you'll need to reconsider your business model if you intend to make profit.


As far as writing a module to request the customer's paypal email address ... I suppose you could do that. I suspect you'll meet with resistance from customers who might prefer to not give out that information.

[Certainly confused]

Thank you so very much for responding and the advice I will take it into account and hope that there might be a way to get my zencart going eventually, any more ideas and comments are 100% welcome, until I learn more about this i'll be more of a zen student for a while :-)