I have a client who wants to sell gift certificates that they would mail out from their business. So I’m looking for advice on credit card processing.

On one site, I use CCNow, which seems to work really fine. It’s easy to set up and isn’t expensive. But I’m wondering what other options people use these days? I tried setting up PayPal for one site, but I’m finding it awfully complicated and confusing for some reason.

Any thoughts?

1) I haven’t heard of EE
2) EE seems expensive
3) EE isn’t open-source

Those familiar concerns can be addressed successfully, depending on the individuals involved on the client’s end.

But sometimes EE can be overruled simply because an IT manager up the ladder blocks the selection of EE simply because of the 3 points above.

Opening this up to the community, what successes (or constructive failures) do you have to share in light of these objections?

i know with EE we can build different webpages.

But is it possible to build webpage like Udemy.com?

I mean, this webpage is like some kind of LMS with learning courses and with subscription system.

I don’t want a copy, just this functionality.

Thanks for your answers.
Saso

So, what are your choices for this spamming?

It’s for EE 2.x so if you are interested please let me know.

Just lost another big job for a client that required an open-source CMS and thought I’d use this opportunity to make a few comments Feel free to disagree or add your thoughts

- Nearly all government jobs these days (at least in NZ) either require, or give huge preference to open source software (for a number of reasons I wont go into right now). A lot of larger private sector clients do the same.
- We are therefore struggling to ‘sell’ EE as a CMS, considering the only real advantage is that we are familiar with it and enjoy using it. Neither of which benefit the client. ‘Security through obscurity’ is a pretty weak argument
- EE, clearly with very limited development resources, are progressing extremely slowly, with very little significant development in 2 years. Single 3rd party developers are making bigger contributions to EE’s advancement than Ellislab (or so it seems). Theres plenty of support staff, but if it was just more user-friendly and experts were encouraged to contribute to the forum, they would need half as much support, and could afford a lot more developers. EE does do a lot of things right, but still theres so much that needs work.

So our options are:
- Quit client work, or stick to smaller private jobs, missing out on nearly all the big (50k+) contracts. This is sustainable at least in the short term, but not if we want to grow quickly, and in the long-term EE will inevitably be outpaced by open-source systems.
- Start using an open-source CMS

Hypothetically, if EE was open-source, its user base would expand rapidly, and the system would develop much more quickly. Ellislab would lose their primary income stream, but would also lose most of their overheads, and could come up with other creative ways of making money, such as other open-source systems do. I love devot-ee and Ryans doing a great job, but the add-on marketplace should logically be owned by Ellislab, and integrated with the EE control panel.

With the talent we have in the add-on community, think how far EE could go. I realize the chances of this happening are slim to nil, but its food for thought at least. I think this goes for all developers - the more EE grows, the more valuable it is to say that we’re experts in it, and the easier it is to sell to clients. Not to mention we’d regularly get new features instead of feature requests.

Cheers,
Dave