Shoes

Last Saturday evening I was out and about when I noticed this shoe shop (Pedex) was open and had tons of people in it.  There was music and goodies so I wandered in.  It turned out to be a moving/open house event.      The place was packed and as it turned out, they were having a drawing every hour for a free pair of shoes!  I  walked over to the table and quickly entered my name as the drawing was about to happen for the hour.

Now, here's the good part....I WON!!  Now, here's where I say what everyone else says who wins a contest..."I never win anything!!"  Well,  it seems that way at least.  Of course I rarely enter contests and I did just the weekend before win this really nice beer glass, but that wasn't all luck, there was some skill involved to that one.  I had to drink a beer in order to enter the contest.

Anyway, I went back to the store last night to pick out a pair of shoes.  I picked these.  Love them!

Winning these shoes was a great way to distract me from the major soap-making mishap I had that weekend.  I'll elaborate more on that later.

A few months ago, or maybe even a year or longer...ok, a while ago I was searching around to find a better method for checkouts on my website.  I started my website using Google Checkout (now known as Google Wallet).   This was a very convenient way for me to track inventory and list products.  Even better it was free!  The only problem with it, however, was many people didn't like it.  Some people didn't have a google login or were confused by the checkout mechanism.  Many people just wanted to use paypal and that wasn't an option with Google Checkout.

After a period of time, I added paypal buttons to my website.  These buttons were created with html generated from a tool on the paypal website.  For various reasons, these buttons were very problematic and buggy.  Using the buttons also meant I had to now maintain inventory and shipping instructions in two different places!  Needless to say, this dual-checkout method didn't last long.

After some searching, I finally found the e-junkie website.

"E-junkie provides shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website,eBay, MySpace, Google Base, CraigsList and other websites using PayPal Payments Standard, PayPal Payments Advanced, PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Payflow Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, TrialPay, ClickBank and 2CheckOut."

For $5 a month e-junkie  provides a shopping cart that will allow you to track inventory, set shipping rules, run discounts/coupons/specials for up to 10 products.  For $8 a month you can do this for up to 100 products!

I have been using e-junkie shopping cart on my website for a while now (about a year?) and it has worked flawlessly.  The interface the seller uses could stand some work as it's not real "pretty" but I didn't find that too distracting.  My main complaint with it would be that I have yet to find a way to "change" a shipping rule. It appears that you need to "delete" a shipping rule then "create" a new rule.  This is a little cumbersome and you need to pay attention because the default for any new shipping rule is to apply it to "all countries".  This could become expensive if you think you're creating this rule for only the US when it fact you didn't change the default (yes, this happened to me and shipping internationally is expensive!)

If you're looking for a way to provide multiple options for checkout on your website at a very low price, I would recommend you give e-junkie a try.   A one week free-trial is available.