Paypal's recent introduction of their Website Payment Pro service has the potential to make much simpler and cheaper for small businesses to add ecommerce to their websites.

In my work with clients to find the right ecommerce solutions, 2 problems keep on reoccuring:

Setup fees and running fees are high
It can cost hundreds of dollars just to get setup, and it's difficult to find a solution for less than $50/month even if you're not selling anything.

Integration between the parties can be difficult
There can be up to 4 parties involved, each wanting their slice of the action and each of which needs to be able to work with the other:

- the shopping cart software on your site
- the payment gateway
- the merchant account
- the bank account

If one of these cannot integrate with the other you are in trouble.

With their new service, Paypal potentially removes these obstacles by getting rid of a few middlemen and charging less:

the prices on the left are a little high, but you get the idea

So in effect you get a payment gateway and merchant credit card account in one go, and for no set-up fees. Also there is no one-year obligation. Looks pretty good, but I will let you know how it fares once I get the chance to use it.

Some logos from thelogocompany.net: creative and cheap

There are many affordable ways to get a corporate identity. Wired Magazine recently conducted a test of some cheap logo providers. They invented a company and asked online shops to create a logo for them. Unfortunately the online version of the article Grading the logo shops does not show the logos they came up with.

The top 3 were these (all comments are from Wired):

- The Logo Company
Service: Three business days; $75. Fast and easy. Ordering was a breeze, and they gave us four decent, relevant designs.
[You can see examples of their work here on the left.]
Grade: B+

- The Logo Loft
Service: Four business days and four options; $99. Sue, the customer service rep, called - called! - to clarify our order.
Grade: B
UPDATE 4/07: A client has had a negative experience with this company recently

- Logo Design Creation
Service: Overnight; $69. Placed the order at the end of one day and got three logos to choose from the next morning. Hey, we are living in the future!
Grade: B-

Gotlogos which I mentioned in the post Making small business look big, cheaply, only got a C+ because

Can't call customer service. Charged an extra $50 for a hi-res digital file of our logo.