Personal Website: Adding Shopping Tools

Airplanepics

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the correct board - so forgive me if it's not!

I have my own website (http://www.london-aviation.com) where I display my aviation images.

I sell my photos to companies for presentations / media distribution etc, however I'd like to add some form of shopping tool where I can sell single copies of images for personal use.

What I plan to do is take the order - and then I'll personally order it through the printing company that I use. So really, all I need are some paypal tools and maybe a checkout?

Can someone give me a hand?!
Cheers

Simon.

Airplanepics

Bump!




Simon

twjnorth

Hi Simon


If you intend to use paypal as the main payment method, create an account if you havent already, then select the "Merchant Tools" tab and you will see an option in the top left called "Buy it now" buttons.

You compete a wizard on the paypal website indicating the price and options such as size/colour for your product and it creates a piece of html that you paste onto your website.

Have a look at this demo

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/dmo/demo_wa_1-outside

the html you add creates the paypal button at the bottom. If people normally only order one item at a time, then this is the simplest option as you dont need to code anything.

The blurb from paypal regarding this type of payment is below. If people buy more than one item at a time then this would not be good enough and you would need to look at either a paypal shopping cart or if you really want a professional looking store, go for something like oscommerce.com which is a free, open source shopping site (needs php and mysql database on your web host) or ecommercetemplates.co.uk (a paid for php or asp solution).

Buy Now Buttons

What is it?
When you use PayPal's Buy Now Buttons, you can sell individual items from your website, or even using a link in an email! Buy Now Buttons is a low-cost way for you to accept credit card and bank account payments, and can be fully integrated with your website in a few easy steps.

What are the benefits?
Save time and money with PayPal's hassle-free Buy Now Buttons:

• Easy to implement - no CGI scripting necessary
• No up-front costs - you'll enjoy the same low fee schedule each time you receive other PayPal payments
• Sell with ease - PayPal maintains detailed transaction records on our website
• Improve buyer experience - with customisable buttons and secure payments, happy customers become repeat customers

Just had a quick look at your site and think paypal buttons would be very easy to add into your pages.

On a separate point, i also noticed you arent using any meta tags to help the search engines find your pages. If someone is looking for something, you need these meta tags to help google and the other search engines offer your page up.
try http://www.addme.com/meta.htm where you just fill in the details and it will generate the metatags, then just paste them into each page.

You might want to include some generic keywords on the homepage such as
"london aviation, aviation photography, london aiport photos" and then specific ones on each page , eg "Luton Airport Photographs", "Luton Easyjet"

You can also help by adding alt tags and title tags to each individual image which also help the search engines e.g.
<img src="http://images/luton-airport-easyjet-boeing-737.jpg&quot; alt="Easyjet 737 takes off from Luton Airport" title="Easyjet 737 takes off from Luton airport">
or something similar to each image and rename the jpg files

Use meaning full names for the directories, images so instead of ltn/tn_1095436.jpg called it luton-airport/easyjet-boeing-737-takes-off and use hyphens instead of underscores as hypens are treated as spaces, underscores are treated as no character so the words are merge and you want to try and optimise for search phrases.

Once you done the metatags, alt tags and directory structure, submit your site via a few free search engine submission sites and try to set up a reciprocal linking strategy with other aircraft related sites or photography sites using keyword phrases in the link text (maybe something like "london aviation photography" as the link text and then a short description.

After a few months, you should start to see traffic coming via the search engines.

If i search for "london aviation" on google.co.uk at the moment, your site comes up as item 32. You might not want to come top for that phrase but you might want to for image searches for plane types or airports so hopefully the above will help a little.

Hope that helps - great photos.

Trev