It’s been a little over a week since we last updated you guys on our progress with Swolled. Our last update was about moving on with a design with the design company Innate Media Group. Since then, a few things have come up that we didn’t expect and hadn’t though about or researched yet.

We knew that our business was going to be an eCommerce site selling products. The term merchant account was thrown at us last summer when we first had our initial thoughts about starting a business, but we didn’t take much of it. As we said in our previous update Will Webb of Innate Media Group is working on completing our details document for the whole project. The other day he contacted me to ask me what merchant service provider we were going to use and gateway and he also asked about a custom or third party shopping cart.

Merchant Service Providers
What? Merchant account and shopping cart? We hadn’t done any research on these things and the last two days we have been reading up on the two subjects and posting on forums like crazy. We’ve found some great articles and received quite a bit of help on the forums, which has helped us make a decision.

Instead of registering for our own merchant account at a local bank, we’ve decided to start with PayPal.com (business not basic account) since their rates are cheap and since they’re a third party merchant account they also provide the gateway. There is no monthly cost and each transaction is only $.35 cents. Eventually, we have plans to create our own merchant account at a local bank after 1 or 2 years of operations.

Shopping Cart
We’ve also decided on a shopping cart to use. We decided not to get a custom shopping cart because it would dramatically increase the cost of our website. We’re probably going to use ModernBill.com as our shopping cart and billing system. We may not have much freedom for the way it looks, but we’ll be able to add images, details, and prices for every product. Remember, as an eCommerce business you aren’t in the industry to win website design awards, but to make sales for a profit. We will eventually move on to have a custom shopping cart made for us.

If you have any suggestions about different merchant service providers and shopping carts please feel free to share them with us. We are by no means professionals on the subjects and could use all the feedback as possible.

If you liked this post please consider adding us to your RSS Feed