I have a hiveminded tech question. Joe and I are in the middle of setting up a coffee roasting business. We have a website (www.simcoffees.com) and now we need to add a shopping cart capability. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to go about doing this? We have seen some companies that will allow you to take credit cards (I don't know all the terminology yet) but many of them seem to charge a lot. We only have one product (bag of roasted coffee) so I don't know that we need something fancy.

Any suggestions?

If you're only going to have a few products, one of the simplest approaches is PayPal's merchant services.

does anyone know how to make an icon? I found some gif's and I'd like to turn one into an icon for my work computer (a G4 Mac).

If you're only going to have a few products, one of the simplest approaches is PayPal's merchant services.

This was my suggestion but everyone else thinks paypal is *too hard* for custimers. I disagree but apparently I'm "net saavy" and therefore not a good judge.

eta: quester, I always use Photoshop, but I don't know if that's the easiest way.

Stephanie, With any shopping cart program, you're also going to have to have a credit card processor. (ETA: unless you get a shopping cart program that has the processing bundled. I don't know enough to say you can't do that.)

Paypal is a credit card and transfer processor. You can buy shopping cart software, or use Paypal's free shopping cart software, and integrate either with Paypal's payment processors.

Paypal has two programs, one of which sends the buyer to Paypal's website to make the payment and one that processes the payment on your website so they never see Paypal. The cost is $20.00 a month for the second one, plus a fee of ~2.9% per transaction. The information on it is here: [link]

You could start with the first one and then change to the second when you had the orders to support it.

Quester, is there something special about the icon? Are you asking what the size requirements are or where it should be saved or how to make a picture fit the size requirements? Or something else I'm not getting because I don't own a mac?

I just experimentally did a regular copy on a jpg picture and successfully pasted it into an unimportant file on my Mac by going into the Info dialog box, clicking on the icon picture and pasting. There wasn't anything special about the picture (other than it was my cat) and it was/is much bigger than the standard icon. It scales down, though....

Thank, Deena! I think we are going to try Paypal for the first month, see how it works, and then make a final decision. I actually really like it and thinks it's fairly simple, but on the down side, our product is low-individual-cost, so the $.30 per transaction costs might get to be really expensive. There are other options but they all require a few hundred upfront, which is fine once we know we can cover that with sales.

I just experimentally did a regular copy on a jpg picture and successfully pasted it into an unimportant file on my Mac by going into the Info dialog box, clicking on the icon picture and pasting. There wasn't anything special about the picture (other than it was my cat) and it was/is much bigger than the standard icon. It scales down, though....

I tried this yesterday but all I got was the "this is a giff or jpeg" image instead of the picture itself. I used to be able to do it when I was on OS9, but I just loaded OSX Tiger on the machine and I wondered if there was some new trick involved.

on the down side, our product is low-individual-cost, so the $.30 per transaction costs might get to be really expensive.

If you find anything cheaper for low cost items and low volume, please let me know!

What happens when you sing the Firefly theme to a Tablet PC: [link]

Note: It should be noted that the "unreview" includes this disclaimer:

Editor's note: Keep in mind that this is not your typical hardware review. While the author spent a number of weeks testing and using the ThinkPad X41 and writes honestly about his experiences, there's a lot of commentary on the ThinkPad X41, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, hardware design, bad software, and rapidly blinking hard drive activity indicators. Keep that in mind as you read the unreview in the spirit with which it was written.