The blog of BaggieAggie, designer of bags, gadget cases and other fabulous accessories handmade in Wales. Sprinkled with recipes, gardening chat, the odd piece of short fiction, and anything else that inspires (or annoys!) me. So pull up a comfy chair and stay a while.


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Sunday 19 August 2012

Do YOU need Paypal payment buttons with drop-down menus...?

As many of my handmade fabric eReader and tablet cases are now made to order, I did, and it was high time I made this change to my Weebly website online store to make life easier for my customers.

Like many Weebly users, I'd been using their 'Revenue' elements - which is great for sellers of uncomplicated items or techno-thickies like me! - but these offer only a choice of simple Add To Cart or Buy It Now buttons.  This meant relying on customers to advise me of their particular Kindle or Kobo via Paypal's message box when paying.  Of course, customers being busy people sometimes forgot, so I would then have to email them for details and wait for a reply.  It was also impossible to offer a variety of gadget cases at different prices within the same listing.  Not an ideal situation, as I'm sure you'll agree.

I admit that, as a techno-clutz and a coward, I'd been putting off these changes for far too long.  But now that Google, Samsung and others are producing small tablets not much larger than eReaders, and I wanted to offer handmade sleeves for these too - within my existing listings - I knew it was time to bite the bullet and get brave.

Amazingly, once I got going, making the Paypal buttons was surprisingly easy.  The complicated part was making the necessary changes within Weebly as I had to replace all the 'Revenue' elements with title/paragraph, photo and html elements before I could import all my new Paypal buttons.  And it took forever!  So if you're planning to do this yourself, I would seriously recommend that you do it while your online store is still in its infancy!

If you decide to give it a go, bear in mind that the drop-down menu options won't accept certain characters.  I'd described one of my options as 'Kindle 4 (£89)', and didn't discover till the next day that anyone choosing this option would receive an error message telling them there was a problem with my website.  Scary!  After some experimentation, I changed the description to 'Kindle 4 (no keyboard)' which sorted out the problem, thank goodness.

So it's finally done, and everything's working as it should.  Anyone wanting to purchase a handmade fabric case for the Kindle Touch, Kindle 4 (no keyboard), Kobo Touch, Kindle 3 (keyboard), Google Nexus 7, or Samsung Galaxy Tab, can now do so with ease.  And I have the opportunity of adding more options as they're needed.  Am exhausted but happy!

If you want to take a peek, you can check out the new buttons on my Tablet & eReader Cases page at BaggieAggie.com.

1 comment:

  1. Ok I'm convinced yes I do need them! Are you going to share how to make the new buttons?

    Maxine x

    ReplyDelete