Making a selection/calculator on a website

Does anyone know how to make a list of radio buttons in groups where it will calculate a price and it can be integrated with a Paypal shopping cart or something similar?

I'm looking for something like the Dell website where you can select components for a computer and order it from my business. I made a form and it had nice little groups of radio buttons and such, but I have no idea how to integrate it with a shopping cart or how to submit it... We're all hardware oriented and I know some HTML, but no other programming languages... Am I screwed?

If it's not something I can do myself, is there a program I can download (or buy, if it's not expensive) that will help me? And lastly, if none of that is possible, what do I need to ask about when looking to hire someone else to do it?

Thanks,
Cody

 

Well, it's generally a bit more complicated than that.
Form submission is easy and requires no more than putting a <form method="post" action="some_page.ext"> ...items...</form>

in your page where ...items... is your group of products and "some_page.ext" is the location of where you're sending the submission to for processing locally first then to the credit card company.

You will need some dynamic programming to occur on the backend so it can send the data to a card processor. Lots of hosts have packages that offer this kind of service for you in either the form of a shopping cart or scripts that can talk to paypal.

Why don't you start there and see if it's something you can handle.. if you decide that what you've built and what the host offers is not compatible, then you may need to to do some programming or have someone integerate it for you.

I work for a company here in Syracuse, NY and I've recently been tasked with building such a gateway and it's almost done. If you get to the point where/if you decided you need to have this done for you, feel free to contact us at www.sitation.com or via 315-472-4678 and tell them that Jim (they'll know who I am) suggestion you call with regards to setting up an e-commerce application.

 

That's great

I'll probably contact you guys, because I've worried about this for too long on my own. Trouble is, I doubt I have enough money to pay for it. Do you have any idea how much it would cost? I already have a web site designed.

Thanks man,
Cody

 

Give them a call and find out, I doubt Kodo is in charge of sales

 

Design is usually a pretty big chunk of the cost, so we can work with your design and implement any cart with it. Wookie is right, I'm not a sales guy so I can't estimate cost for you but I can say that our new gateway will make it real easy for me to put the code together and since we've already built one site around the service, I wouldn't expect it to take long. The length of time may or may not factor in the cost as I don't know if they would charge you per hour or flat rate. Best I can say is give us a buzz and ask for Sam (he's the rep) and tell him Jim sent you.

Though I feel it prudent to state clearly at this time that our gateway only works with verisign services (www.verisign.com) so if you want to go paypal, it would jump the time and probably the cost up as well because we'd have to code for it.

paypal is on our list of todo's, but verisign is more or less the defacto standard.

 

Thanks Kodo,

I emailed sales@sitation.com and mentioned you referring me to talk to Sam.