Hi all,
I'm looking into the possibility of building an shop website for a client. I usally use Rapidweaver, have Rapidcart and a trial version of PayLoom. Have also looked into Cartloom. However, there doesn't seem to be any way of adding payment options, so if one doesn't want to use PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize net etc, one is stuck. My client wants to be able to accept credit card payments directly rather than via PayPal and since we're in France it would seem from our research so far that he needs a VAD/ merchant account in France...
He currently has a a site, I won't give the details, but it's a UK based e-shop, in English only, with various payment options but most of these are UK banks with which he can't open an account since he's in France. A couple of the banks are international and we're looking into those... But in any case, having his own site would suit him better and is likely to be less expensive.
I'm looking for ideas/suggestions really....anything helpful anyone knows about e-commerce in France. In particular:
Does anyone have experience of using Bluepaid as a payment gateway and if so what e-commerce sites you have used to work with that?
Any recommendations for e commerce sites in general which allow for use of multiple languages - we can then see what payment options one can use..
Any recommendations for payment processers?
Is anyone making an e-commerce site really work profitably as an auto-entrepreneur? Is it possible?? What with ebay charges, PayPal charges, payment gateways, company accounts and extra charges at the banks, it's very difficult to work out the most economical option. Not to mention postage costs adding to turnover! So if anyone has been through these hoops already, please would you share whatever you have found?
Yours in anticipation :)
Thanks
Heather
Hi Heather,
If you're looking for a shopping cart with a lot of possibilities, including various payment gateways (free or paid), you might take a look at Magento or Prestashop. They are both multilingual, and there are a lot of plugins / extensions / modules (free as well as paid) that can do what your client wants. A quick google search showed that apparently there is a payment module for BluePaid. I myself am a professional web developer, and I also build custom extensions for Magento.
Although Magento itself is free, total costs can be quite high, if you want a lot of customisations and / or paid plugins. For my own webshop I only use Paypal, have installed a free template (layout), have found a decent hosting company in Holland (I'm Dutch, living and working in France by the way), so for starters I'd personally go for that. If everything sells well, you could easily do some customisations et cetera.
I do not have any experience whatsoever with English legislation. About the bank account thing: you can link your paypal account to any bank account you want. Mine happens to be in France, but as far as I know that's no problem (I could be wrong though, but you certainly can find it on the Paypal site I guess).
Hope this helps, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Regards,
Tom
Hello Brian,
Thanks. The turnover is likely to warrant the expense of a better payment system but obviously we need to keep the cost to a minimum. Either that or the client sticks with Paypal and accepts the chargebacks, which MIGHT in the long run be more cost effective, but is unlikely to happen, on principle.
We are thinking of something like Worldpay (have contacted them) or the HSBC equivalent since they work in both countries. A UK merchant account, like a UK bank account, we assumed was impossible for a French resident trader. So hoping that something like Worldpay integrated into the existing UK site could work with a French bank account.
No I'm not at all a hardcore web developer. I do edit html sometimes but like Rapidweaver just because it's so easy. I'm certainly not up to writing my own shopping cart and integrating with a bank! But many of the online shops seem to have partnerships with the payment processors so that the two systems can be easily combined.
I have since found La Poste boxecommerce shops and their payment system, which at least is all the same company so may be the way to go...
We also need pages in English and French, ability to calculate postage according to destination and payment in sterling and euros if possible, so that complicates things a bit..
Bluepaid rather than Bluepay, it's a French company, and one that doesn't appear to be need the customer to have a company bank account with a VAD... any experience anyone has with them would be most useful to hear about.
Thanks again