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[F808]Free Shopping Cart Site

by Steve Johnson, Ste

If you sell a product or a service, you will want to have shopping cart capabilities on your website. This will help customers buy more than one product at a time, and it can also help customers figure out shipping and handling costs before they choose to buy. The more options you give your customers, the better chance that they will stay your customers and coming back for more.

So, if you are selling merchandise on an ecommerce website, you will want to consider using a shopping cart like osCommerce Shopping Cart, CubeCart, Zen Cart or Agora Shopping Cart. Falcoda Internet has these shopping carts available for auto installations with the Ecommerce Hosting Plan.

Next you will need to choose a payment processing service tool such as PayPal or WorldPay. This is a payment processing service that you can set up in order to offer your customers and easier way to buy from your website. The PayPal account is free to set up, and you are only charged a small percentage for every transactions. And since you only have to pay when you make a transaction, there are no monthly fees to handle. This is the most cost effective way to please your customers. The WorldPay option, although has a setup fee and ongoing monthly charge has a number of benefits, mainly that if you already have your own merchant number for credit and debit card payment, WorldPay will allow you to use this along with their service to process payments online.

With this type of merchant account, you can now have 'But It Now' buttons anywhere you choose on your website, or you can set up an entire webpage dedicating to the purchasing of your products. Both PayPal and WorldPay offer help and advice of how to add the 'Buy it Now' style buttons or carts to your website. It is up to you, and your site design with determine what route you want to go with that.

Make sure that you are giving your customers what they need. Just like people in a real store, they probably want to buy more than they can carry at one time, so give them a shopping cart to make life a little easier.

E-commerce has exploded on the internet and many successful businesses exist solely on the web. And why not? With a virtual storefront, the overhead costs of running a business are greatly reduced. Therefore, with effective marketing, these businesses can hang on during the difficult early stages of a new business and are less dominated by cash flow while trying to stay afloat.

One of the major reasons for the surge in online purchasing has been the convenience and security of the shopping cart feature on e-commerce sites. The virtual interface of putting things into a 'cart' has, at once, a comfortable familiarity and whimsy. It really is an elegant system that has won the confidence of the online shopper through its proven security.

There are many different vendors of shopping cart services. So how does one go about choosing the right one for their e-commerce site?

The very first thing you have to do is to decide exactly what, and how much product you are going to be selling. Are you selling 1 item? A line of similar items? A catalog full of many different products, and if so, then how will your site present this catalog?

What will be your volume of sales this year? Next year? In five years? Some shopping cart services are great for lower volume sales with less product variety and no catalog. Other shopping cart services allow for complex, high volume sales and catalog features.

In terms of cost of the cart service, you need to find the shopping cart option that matches your selling volume.

PayPal offers a fantastic, free-to-set-up shopping cart that is great for lower volume sales. Your fees to them are a percentage of each of your sales. In addition, you can automatically take major credit card payments without setting up credit card merchant services. This saves you $300-$400 right off the bat.

For high volume sales you may pay less going with a shopping cart vendor that charges you a monthly fee rather than a percentage of your sales.

You also need to look at the purchase process the shopping cart service offers. Potential customers abandoning the purchase because they weren't shown the shipping costs before they were required to give their credit card information, for example, can be devastating to sales. The simpler, clearer and shorter the process from cart to sale, the better. At no point should the potential ciustomer feel that there is a surprise ahead.

Finally, the look of the shopping cart needs to fit the visual theme of your site. Most shopping cart services have several variations on a basic look. Make sure one of those variations works.

Basic services will range anywhere from $10 to $30 per month. Remember to add in the cost of credit card merchant services if you want to accept credit card customers. And this is highly recommended. The downside of online purchases is that the customer must wait for the item to be shipped. Having to wait even longer for a money order to be received, or worse, a check to clear, on top of shipping time reduces the convenience of online shopping to the point where sales could be lost.

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About Author

Both Steve Johnson & Richard Radcliffe are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Steve Johnson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Auto Insurance and Cheap Insurance for Car. S Johnson writes on a number of topics including web hosting, domain name registration, e-commerce, SEO and SEM, Email & Spam for