The good news is that the site is complete. But all is not rosy. As we test the ordering process, we realise that Paypal’s standard merchant service is not as flexible as I thought it was.

We essentially want Paypal to only take the credit card details, but it seems the system also allows the user to complete the shipping details. We don’t want that as we are collecting that info on our site as we are only shipping to certain countries and have different rates for each.

We are now faced with three options:

1. Go ahead with the current system: in this scenario, we get to launch right away but we’re concerned the payment process might be a bit confusing. If we do go ahead, we’ll have to think of the right blurb to put before sending our customers to the Paypal site.

2. Get a Paypal Pro account: to do so, we have to open a US business banking account. This might take an additional week to complete as long as the US banks allow someone else to act on our behalf.

3. Get a regular internet merchant account: this is what we were ultimately aiming for, but the process is onerous and lengthy (2-3 weeks) especially for a start-up. Fortunately, Business Partner received his Canary Wharf-sized bonus today so I doubt we’ll have any problems passing the credit check. This option also means that we will have time to release our other sets of T-shirts (we’ve got a quite few in the pipeline).

Time to put on our thinking caps.