Online Shopping Cart Solutions: How to Choose the Right Shopping Cart for Your Website
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It can be both exciting and a bit overwhelming when you are starting your first ecommerce website, and choosing the best online shopping cart solution is a big first step. In this article we'll take a high level overview of the things that you should take into consideration when you are getting ready to choose a shopping cart for your website. Keep in mind that you can start small with a simple solution and then scale up as your business grows if a limited budget is an issue in the beginning.
What is a shopping cart?
An online shopping cart is a piece of software or a script that handles the collection of and the totaling up of your customer's orders for your website. On the front end, there's the website and all of the product pages that your customer's are picking products from and clicking that, 'Add to Cart,' button. On the backend, the shopping cart keeps track of the items your customers choose, how many they want, and where it will be shipped to. When it has totaled up the amount of the order, the information gets passed along to the payment processor or merchant account where it is either approved or denied. After the payment processing has taken place the order is confirmed and the information is fed to whatever fulfillment mechanism you have in place.
Here's how it works:
Your website → shopping cart script ↔ merchant account/ payment processor
How do I choose the right shopping cart for my needs?
The answer to that question varies with every vendor. The shopping cart that you choose will depend on several factors including:
There are basically two major categories of online shopping carts: 1. premium shopping carts and, 2. open source or free shopping carts. There are literally hundreds of different shopping cart solutions to choose from, but there are a few that are popular with online merchants for several reasons. We will only mention a few of each type, and our listing these programs is not an endorsement of them.
Premium shopping carts:
To learn more about ecommerce shopping carts, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today where you will discover tips and other resources for growing your online business.
What is a shopping cart?
An online shopping cart is a piece of software or a script that handles the collection of and the totaling up of your customer's orders for your website. On the front end, there's the website and all of the product pages that your customer's are picking products from and clicking that, 'Add to Cart,' button. On the backend, the shopping cart keeps track of the items your customers choose, how many they want, and where it will be shipped to. When it has totaled up the amount of the order, the information gets passed along to the payment processor or merchant account where it is either approved or denied. After the payment processing has taken place the order is confirmed and the information is fed to whatever fulfillment mechanism you have in place.
Here's how it works:
Your website → shopping cart script ↔ merchant account/ payment processor
How do I choose the right shopping cart for my needs?
The answer to that question varies with every vendor. The shopping cart that you choose will depend on several factors including:
- What will your web hosting company support/ be compatible with?
- Your budget
- Number of different items you are selling
- Physical product
- Virtual/ downloadable product
- Do you want to be able to offer coupons?
- Recurring billing
- Cross selling (if you like that item, you might like this item)
- Autoresponder/ email newsletter
- Which solutions will work with my payment processor?
There are basically two major categories of online shopping carts: 1. premium shopping carts and, 2. open source or free shopping carts. There are literally hundreds of different shopping cart solutions to choose from, but there are a few that are popular with online merchants for several reasons. We will only mention a few of each type, and our listing these programs is not an endorsement of them.
Premium shopping carts:
- PayPal is a no-brainer, simple ecommerce solution that might work for those who are just getting started with a small operation because it's a shopping cart and payment processor in one. You pay a percentage of each sale, but you get free fraud protection.
- Volusion provides an extensive list of features for the ecommerce website. It includes web design tools, advanced tax features, and a social store builder.
- 1ShoppingCart is an all in one ecommerce, marketing solution that allows you to automate your email marketing, manage affiliates, promote, manage, build and sell.
- ZenCart
- WordPress eCommerce
- Magento
To learn more about ecommerce shopping carts, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today where you will discover tips and other resources for growing your online business.