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.
