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Feb 2013

I recently just joined e-junkie and am looking at the different possibilities and things that we may be able to do with the service here for our light bulb store. I wanted to know is it possible to mass upload or catalog of products as we have over 5,000 different products and if we are able to integrate with our current configuration with authorize.net instead of using google checkout or paypal?

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    Feb '13
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    Feb '13
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We do work well with Authorize.net, information on setting up with them can be found here:

2http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/authorize.net-shopping-cart.htm2



We can also help you with a product import provided you don't need to use any options which change the price or weight of your physical products, just send us an email at support@e-junkie.com or use the contact form to send us a message about that so that we can verify what information is needed and send you the template.

Each of our products are of different shape, size, and weights (light bulbs) let me know how we may be able to work together since we have to create specialized shipping algorithms for when people purchase more than one item at a time.

This help page explains our shipping calculation settings:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.shipping.htm



When you fill out the product import file we'd send you, you can specify a per-unit shipping weight for each product. You could just specify actual weights to use with our USPS rate-lookup feature, or you could set the weight as equivalent to a per-unit flat shipping rate to work with the custom calculation scheme described here:

1http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.shipping.item-specific-flat-rate.htm1



Bear in mind that E-junkie does not generate any online storefront or product-listing pages for you. Even if we import products for you, it would still be up to you to build your own Web site and paste our button codes for each product into your site somehow. Our button codes do at least follow a common format, where only the Item Number varies among different products' button codes, so you could have custom scripting programmed to automate inserting button codes into your site.

Okay so now I am slightly confused and apologize in advance for any questions that may be off. The site I have is called: http://1lightbulbs.com and as you can see we have lots of individual lighting products for sale. What would we do with e-junkie? Would it just be recreating another version of our site with e-junkies e-commerce platform? What are the benefits to utilizing your platform over the one we have custom built thus far?

Frankly, in your circumstances, I'm not sure you would see any benefit to using E-junkie in place of your existing, custom-built site. What shortcoming of your existing ecommerce platform were you looking to overcome, and what did you see about E-junkie that seemed to address that need?



E-junkie is designed to be a very simple, basic ecommerce service to meet very simple, basic ecommerce needs. Do-it-yourselfer proprietors of modest technical inclination can easily copy and paste our cart button codes into their existing sites to get started selling a fairly limited product range online, without having to install or manage any ecommerce software or payment security provisions on their own servers. This reduces the effort and technical learning required to get started selling online, especially when using a more full-featured platform may be overkill for the merchant's needs anyway; however, this may be a moot point for you, since you already have an established site where you're selling online, so the effort of transitioning from your existing, sophisticated system to our much more limited solution may not be worthwhile for you.



We also do not provide a CMS that could generate and manage site content such as an online catalog with product pages, like you have now, nor do we provide Web site hosting or handle payment processing. With our solution, you would still be responsible for building your own site and managing your product listing pages independently of us, and you'd simply copy the Add to Cart and View Cart button codes we provide to paste into your site's product pages (or you might have custom scripting developed to help automate this somewhat). To handle your checkout payments, you would integrate us with a payment processor such as PayPal or Google Checkout, or use a payment gateway such as Authorize.Net or PayPal Payments Pro for card-based direct payments.



We are also not very well-suited to businesses such as yours that have a huge number of diverse physical products that may need to be updated frequently or en masse -- e.g., imagine needing to scroll through a dropdown menu of 5000 products to edit each one individually when needed. While we do offer a $130/mo subscription plan for up to 5000 tangible products, I don't think we have anyone actually subscribed at that level or anywhere near it, and this monthly fee would only cover your use of our service, not any Web site development or hosting costs or payment processor transaction fees, which would be independent of us.



Honestly, I don't think E-junkie would be a good fit for your business as a replacement for your current, custom-built site. Your needs would probably be best served with a full-featured ecommerce software package that gets installed on your server and manages all aspects of your online storefront and sales from end to end, similar to what you already have. Offhand, I might suggest looking into something like Magento, which seems to be one of the more popular solutions of this type, with many independent developers available for hire who are already familiar with and supporting that platform. Even so, I'm not sure such an off-the-shelf solution would be any better than the custom-built solution you already have.

E-Junkieguru,



Just for the in depth response and time you took to explain things is incredibly impressive and graciously appreciated. When I first stumbled upon e-junkie I thought it was similar to sites like the find where you can help us propagate store front pages on the websites here. The options you gave me would be certainly feasible and ascertainable if we had a much smaller catalog and not as much discrepancies with respect to changing prices along with various quantities per bulbs along with 4ft fluorescent tubes and 8 foot bulbs needing different packaging than traditional light bulbs.



Thank you so much for the assistance and help and I will be sure to give a strong recommendation in the future for anybody who has an interest in a smaller e-commerce front.