For web shops, we recommend using an e-commerce/shopping cart program to create and maintain your shop catalog using a MySQL database. We have two programs that we work with regularly: Zen Cart and CKGold.

Both of these programs will work with your PayPal account, though you can set them up to work with merchant accounts and many other solutions.

CKGold and Zen Cart will create your catalog based on products you've added through the administration interface and save this information in a database. In terms of updating, if you use one of the shopping cart programs, all category/product page updating will be done in a simple admin tool, and you will never have to touch the HTML.

Unless you're very familiar with HTML, I wouldn't recommend having us set up a PayPal-only cart for you, as it will be time consuming and difficult for you to make updates to your site.

Setting up ecommerce software will make your site very easy for you to maintain on your own, and it often costs the same (or even less) to use one of these programs rather than having us create each page of your site from scratch, then add PayPal buttons. This is because the cart creates all the pages, so we configure the cart to do what you want and work on the design templates, and everything else from there on out is automatic.

When choosing between our ecommerce programs, one consideration is that the CKGold admin tool that you'll be using to work with your products is more user-friendly and easier to learn. However, it has less options than Zen Cart.

Zen Cart is a bit more complicated, and may take you a while longer to get the hang of, but it is a very powerful tool, and almost anything you'll be able to think of doing with it, we'll be able to do.

Another concern is that with CKGold, anyone can buy your items with no preliminary steps, while with Zen Cart, customers must create an account to purchase. However, the information your customer has to give to create an account is pretty much the information they'd need to give to buy a product, and it is then used in the checkout process, so they don't have to enter their address twice. I am not sure how much this extra step affects sales, if at all.

We provide a tutorial that explains how to do the basics, step by step. We are also available to do a reasonable amount of customer support for you once your shop is set up.

To get more detailed information and compare the two programs in every aspect, please see our cart comparison chart.