Helen's Handmades

With much gnashing of teeth and swearing, followed by alternating between crying and shouting, I re-trod my steps, not once, but twice and then yet again.  I called in favours from people I knew (and from some I didn’t) and still couldn’t get the darned thing working.  PayPal didn’t have a clue what I was talking about and if they didn’t know, things were looking decidedly grim.

I pondered the situation and decided to contact PayPal via their support forums.  Hahaha!  Nothing.  Not even an “I have no idea what you are talking about”.  It was like watching tumbleweed blow down the main street.  Finally I had a really helpful reply: “Have you tried your shopping cart’s forum?”.  Doh, why didn’t I think of that?  I refrained from a sarcastic outburst.  I could only hope that my desperate pleas for help would be seen on my shopping cart’s forum.

Being a naturally impatient sort of person, I decided to trawl through the forum to find any replies from someone with a modicum of intelligence, where the cart was concerned.  I did find someone who actually replied to me and behold, my PayPal problem was solved!  With a couple of minor problems to sort out, I was ready.

Well, if you are reading this, then I finally made it.  After what seems like an eternity, I am now online. For those who don’t know me, I rarely give up on something, usually at the cost of my sanity.  This came pretty close, I must admit.

I have been making websites for a long time and coding them by hand is something I am at ease with, but eCommerce is a whole new beast and especially as my online store isn’t simply a case of buying off-the-shelf goods.  To cut a long story short, I needed to be able to combine all my items with different choices to go into a shopping cart and then pay via PayPal.  I thought that would be easy.   Nope – completely wrong on that one!

I managed to get all my pages as I wanted them and as I am paying for the privilege, I decided to ask my web host’s advice.  They suggested I downloaded a free shopping cart, which I did.  That was in January.  I couldn’t install it, so I asked them for help.  They managed to get it installed but they took out my email program doing so and I thought I’d lost everything from my business folders.  I was distraught (again).  You don’t realize how important something is until you don’t have it. 

They managed to fix the problem they had caused, eventually.  I think that took a couple of weeks, with one thing and another.  Finally, I unleashed the shopping cart with bated breath.  It was awful! All that time, wasted, for nothing.  I could have cried.  I didn’t dare tell the web host that I didn’t like it.

I had to find another cart.  Unbelievably, I found just what I needed, so I installed it and with a bit of tweaking, had it working quite quickly – oh, apart from the tiny little PayPal problem, that is.  PayPal wouldn’t recognize the shopping in the cart.  Great. Just what I needed.