Accepting Payment, Collecting Info, Forms etc.

[kathleen]

I have been humming along building my first website for quite some time now, and I have come upon a roadblock that I can't seem to get around. So I come to all you intelligent and creative people to help me find a solution.
My business is selling, among other things, personalized letters for children. So as you can guess, at some time in the ordering process I need to collect a bunch of information such as name, age, family members, favorite color, interests, etc.

I had intended to use Paypal to collect payments. The problem with this is that they don't give me anywhere to collect the information needed for the personalization. I did some hunting, and found that with the shopping cart from mals-e, I could collect this information as options. The problem with this is that I would them be required to have a page for each letter (there are 50 or so) in order to get all this info collected, and then the customer would have to enter the information over and over again for each letter they want to purchase. This doesn't sound very user friendly to me.

I also thought about trying to create a form that would collect the personalization information, then once they submitted the information, they would be directed to Paypal to make the payment.

Is this possible? Would it work? Is there a better, easier, or smarter way to do this?

Please HELP!! Things were going so well until I hit this issue . I'm sure with the help and encouragement of you all, I will find a way to solve the problem .

Thanks in advance,
Kathleen

[flensborg]

Hi Kathleen,

I haven't used PayPal myself, but aren't you given access to the emailaddress of your customers?

If you are you could send them an email, requesting the needed information in their reply.

Or if you can customize the order confirmation email you could have a link to a page where they could enter their ordernumber and fill in the needed information.

[Lynn Terry]

[MrGrammar]

[Steve MacLellan]

[kathleen]

[Lynn Terry]

[karadawn]

Just to give you some more options, is great to use. I believe they have a way to set up additional information needed from customers. Best of all - it's free!

[dlee]

On the bottom of the page when you set up your ordering information on paypal, there is a button labeled "Add More Options" When you click on this, one of the options is to get information from your customer like color etc. This puts a form on your website with your item. It is set up for two options, but you could put name and relatives names on one and interests etc. on the other. You can probably add more options if you know much HTML code.

[Jennifer Hadorn]

If you need some help passing information into the shopping cart with a form, I can help you with that. I'm familiar with Mals-e and figured out how to make forms (FINALLY) that did what I needed them to do.

You can see an example of what I did here: http://weddings.giftsbyjennifer.com/bagsboxes.html. Keep in mind it's under construction, but that's an idea of what you can do with it.

Just let me know.