Hi all,
I am interning with a nonprofit that wants to set up an online store, and I was asked to investigate shopping cart options. We want to use Dwolla for customers to pay, and we found Zen Cart on their site:https://developers.dwolla.com/dev/carts.
We are looking for a hosted cart solution.
Our website, http://ClassWish.org, already lets people make charitable donations to fund classroom supplies for any school or teacher in the country. See:
http://classwish.org/schools/128413-...mentary-School (one of 125,000 school pages)
http://classwish.org/teachers/15696-Michael-Angel (one of many teacher pages)
We manage that process with customizable PayPal standard buttons. It works fine for our purposes.
We want to let visitors shop for gift cards, too. We will have about 1,000 cards (about 250 retailers, each with about 4 price points). Visitors pay the face amount of the gift card, and we donate the 5% or so margin we earn to the wish list of the school or teacher they want to support. That thin margin is the reason we want to use Dwolla.
In order to identify make it easy for visitors, we will have the gift card shopping experience on a page for every school and on a page for every teacher. That way, they do not have to specify the school or teacher from among so many options (and with so many having the same name). Instead, they would just go to the gift card shopping page for their preferred school or teacher, and we would just grab the school or teacher ID from the page, and we would pass it through to the cart. (BTW, our site is built in Ruby on Rails).
Again, PayPal is not a good solution for the gift cards, since our margin is so thin. We therefore want to use Dwolla.
We looked at stores, such as Shopify, Magento, and Big Commerce, but none of them is really well-suited to having the shopping experience on our site, which is where we want to keep the visitors. (That is because we want them to see the donation opportunities, too, and so we can automatically grab the ID from the school or teacher page they are on).
We envision something somewhat akin to our use of customizable PayPal standard buttons for donations, but leading to a cart that uses Dwolla checkout (confirmed users only, not guests). That is:
· We would have a gift card shopping page for each school and teacher page
· We would have the same thousand gift card items on each of those school or teacher pages
· The person would click the ‘add to cart’ button for whatever gift card (a particular retailer and price point, such as the Exxon $100 gift card)
· The code for that button would already specify the specific card (retailer and price point). We would customize the button to pass through to the cart the ID for the school or teacher whose page the visitor is shopping from.
An alternative approach would also let the customer check a box for each of the cards they want and then click a single button to go to the cart.
I am just wondering whether Zen Cart allows this process.
Thanks,
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