Shopping Carts

There's a plethora of virtual shopping cart providers , and deciding which is best for your business can be a big head scratcher!

I have tried out probably about ten and spent several years before deciding on my current favourite . All carts have are not the same , and 1 that suits 1 business may not necesaarily suit another business.

The first thing you need to think about is price - if you have an unlimited budget then this will not be an issue . If you have no budget then you may like to consider OScommerce or Cubecart , if you only intend accepting paypal payments then paypal standard has it's own shopping cart - available in the merchant's tools section of the paypal site .

Some webhosts provide their own eshopping scripts as part of their hosting plans try 1&1 , this German website hosting provider offers a complete estore that can be maintained via your browser.

You also need to decide what means of accepted payments are preferred - You can offer just Paypal , or the new Google Checkout , you should also consider offering credit and direct cards (the new incarnation of Paypal - paypal pro allows you to do this) , Worldpay Netbax Protx etc are all good third party merchant bank providers but we prefer PayplPro - All good carts will interface with these , although Google checkout has only just been rolled out and is not available to all carts.

DIY Carts

You could of course develop your own simple shopping cart with a little scripting knowledge , but remember you will need a secure server for handling credit cards etc. and more importantly you need to be careful to create a robust and safe ordering/ invoicing system - for this reason most webshops rely on third party dedicated software

Our favourite card (and Malls Ecommerce a close second) is RomanCart , we use it on our ad9 gifts store , the beauty of this cart is it is standalone and can be "bolted on" to just about any website. Whereas most of the others (except Malls Ecom) are complete front and backend systems (ie: admin and shopfront are not seperated).

With Romancart (or Malls-Ecommerce) you simple nead to create Buy Now buttons / links from your website , the carts are hosted with secure servers / I prefer Romancart over Malls Ecommerce as it is easier to set up the shipping / and implements Google checkout but both are similar. (With Romancart you can optionally manage the products from the cart end but i use dynamically produced static product pages).

The sites i create lend themselves well to Romancart (i import products from my wholesaler convert them to php and simply create the buy now links easy !), if you would like help on using ROmancart or anything to do with shopping carts try posting on our forum