New AKA web site

[Barry Cooper <bjc3 at cornell_edu>]

Hi all,

As many of you know, the AKA will be moving it's web site to a commercial 
hosting company as soon as I can get it ready to go live. The main reason 
is that I am no longer at Cornell, where the old server is hosted.

In putting the site together, I have to rebuild a lot of stuff, and I'm 
doing a complete reorganization and redesign intended to make navigation 
more easy. Amongst the major tasks I have to do is to rebuild the online 
store to run on the new server (which is Linux, rather than Mac OS). There 
are shopping cart solutions provided by the hosting company, or I could 
choose to use the PayPal shopping cart solution. The advantage of the 
latter is that we don't have to purchase our own secure certificate, as 
credit card information is provided to PayPal on their secure servers. This 
would save the AKA a few hundred bucks at startup, as well as a couple of 
hundred a year in ongoing costs. The other side of the coin is that I 
believe that I will have more flexibility to customize a store made with 
one of the provided shopping cart solutions, including the ability to make 
the store look more unique.

I am posting this message because I'd like input regarding the 
acceptability of using the PayPal system. As many of you know, this system 
would pass off a request to pay for an AKA item to PayPal. You need to be 
signed up with them to make the payment. That means if you are not already 
signed up, you would have to do so at the time of the purchase by giving 
them your name, email address and credit card information. It is not a lot 
different from giving us that information, really. PayPal would bill your 
credit card and transfer the money, less the appropriate transaction fee 
(which is less than we currently pay, that is, part of the savings) to the 
AKA account. We would probably maintain our own merchant credit card 
account, though, for use at the convention.

After all that long explanation, my question is simply this: Do any of you 
have experience using stores that require payment via PayPal. Do you have 
any discomfort with this system of payment? Do you like it?

Any input will be appreciated. It will certainly be easier and quicker to 
implement a PayPal based system.

Thanks,

Barry

Barry J. Cooper, Prof. Emeritus, Dept. Biomedical Sciences, Cornell University
Adjunct faculty, College of Veterinary Medicine, Oregon State University
Home address: 27505 Riggs Hill Rd., Sweet Home, OR 97386 (bjc3 at cornell_edu)


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