Need shopping cart advice

So you want to sell access to all / multiple articles, with one payment? All for 1 price, or you want a big page with checkboxes (“Check the articles you want to buy for $3 each”)?

If it’s the simplest — you just want 1 payment and then you will give access to Alllllll the articles, you have a couple choices I thought of.

1) you can make the “article” (the post that Paypal gives access to) as an Index of all the articles. They buy access to the index, from there they can download any of the articles linked on that index.

2) Or set up a whole second WordPress install… and set it up for Registered Users only to get access to this whole site. Now you can put articles as different Posts on this second-website. Now you can charge for access to this entire second website. Charge to become a “registered member”. Then your registered members can log in to the second site and read whatever they want.

Hope these ideas help ya.

There are several shopping-cart type plugins, but I haven’t tried them all. Many are designed for shipping products, not for giving access to webpages.

Thanks for your input, Dgold. Unfortunately, my need is to sell individual articles, not a suscription-type access to all articles. Given the nature of the articles, most people are only going to be interested in one, so I don’t need to be able to check out multiple items in a single transaction. I do, however, need to be able to redirect after checkout to whichever individual article the customer has purchased. (Or set up an automatically-generated email to the customer containing a link to the article they’ve purchased.)

Anyone have any other ideas?

I think this may be what you want:
https://www.idevspot.com/iSubscribe.php
It will let you sell individual articles. Not sure how quickly you can set up multiple pages though.. send the creator an email.

wp-ecommerce from Instinct.co.nz will handle all of this.

“Will the WordPress shopping cart app(s) permit multiple, different redirects after checkout? Alternatively, will one of them generate an automatic email to the customer that contains a link to a download page?”

It will generate an email with the download link in it.

How do the WordPress shopping cart app(s) handle security of personally identifiable info? (One of the main attractions of the PayPal cart is that they are responsible for all that.)

PayPal is one of the gateways you can use, the other methods are also secure. In addition you can add https for WordPress as a plugin.

There are several different WordPress shopping carts — please include any advice on which version (if any) would meet my needs.

For your purpose it sounds like the free version would work fine. I would certainly recommend at least starting there.

another vote for wp-ecommerce
its not perfect but it is the best free one

Of course WP ECommerce!!