Thoughts on Interaction Design

Because I have a hard time staying focused on The Task At Hand (which is really editing all hell out of this manuscript), I started doing some preliminary research on payment systems for eCommerce sites. The last time I did something like this was back in 2001, and the choices were pretty limited; you could work with Vignette, Trilogy, and other enterprise providers and pay a million bucks to get something that most likely didn’t work. The state of plug-and-go payment systems has much evolved, and even has some silly 2.0 players (although I’m not sure why I need AJAX in my Buy Now! Button).

This forum lists a ton of processing/purchasing solutions.

It looks like the worst option for me is to set up a merchant account with my bank, Bank Of America, and then fold that system into an online presence. BoA will charge me $150 to set up the account, $20 per month, and ten cents a transaction. That’s obviously ridiculous, so I did a bit of research on how to get away from big banking.

Shopify offers me a “shop in minutes, a business for life”. That sounds pretty good, but once you start to poke around, you realize that they really give you a “shopping cart in minutes, the ability to integrate your inflated-cost BoA account in weeks, and a business that has fancy AJAX enabled components for life”. I’m actually sort of at a loss in trying to understand what it is Shopify does, exactly; while they certainly have a "feature-rich" interface, in order to enable Visa, MasterCard and AmEx purchases, you need the aforementioned Merchant Account from BoA. I guess Shopify just gives me a basic online purchasing template and shopping cart functionality, and then takes 3% of my profits.

Big Cartel seems to realize that its competitors (ie, Shopify) have lost sight of reality, and says things like “By leaving out all the complicated crap that makes other services so frustrating to use, we've made it ever so easy to get your store up and running and looking great in no time”. They seem to have the same base-set of functionality as Shopify, but the site seems a hell of a lot more usable, useful and desirable. They offer the majority of their payment processing through Paypal, which led me to …

Paypal. I was under the impression that they would require users to pay with a Paypal account, but I was wrong. Paypal has added the ability for merchants to integrate Visa, et al easily onto a site. Users are redirected to Paypal for one screen - the purchasing experience - and are then pushed back into the normal flow of the referring site. Once I registered as a merchant and found Website Payments Standard, I was delighted to see scenarios of use illustrating the ability to integrate purchases:

Scenario 1. I already have a shopping cart.
Scenario 2. I need a shopping cart.
Scenario 3. I want to sell one item at a time.

Let’s hear it for solid interaction design!

Paypal takes 3% of my profits, but doesn’t require the merchant account from the bank; they’ll handle the book-keeping, allow me to print mailing labels, determine tax, and all that jazz. It looks like Paypal is the way to go for a small, one-item shop such as mine.