Online Business Website Building Tips and Resources 

Selecting the Right Online Shopping Cart for Your Online Business

 

Deciding what type of online shopping cart program to use in your business website can be quite an overwhelming task, simply because there are tons of businesses online that offer shopping cart programs.

Now you may be thinking, “what if I just add PayPal ‘buy now’ buttons to my home business website?” (PayPal is a third-party payment processor that will handle the actual credit card processing.) Well, you can do that, but you should take into consideration the type of products or services you will sell online. Let’s say that you sell hammocks online, but you have more than 200 different hammock styles and colors to sell. It would not be the smartest or easiest thing to add a PayPal “buy now” button to each and every different hammock style description. That would be working way too hard.

 

Let’s Pretend for a Moment

Let’s say that we did want to do PayPal “buy now” buttons for each different hammock. You would have to login to PayPal, set the price, grab the code, and add it to your page, then repeat the whole process, again and again!

 

 

Work Smarter!

There are shopping cart programs that allow you to easily add products and prices without working so hard. So don’t just rely on PayPal “buy now” buttons. You can still use PayPal, and we’re not saying they’re bad; simply use a shopping cart program that has a PayPal integration feature. Most online shopping carts are PayPal integrated.

 

If You Sell Digital Goods

Some online shopping cart programs can securely host your digitally downloadable products. For example, we use e-junkie.com shopping cart for MommyEmpire.com. If you sell e-books, audio files, graphics, or anything that is a downloadable product, they will store the zip or PDF file for you on their secure site. When customers make a purchase they are redirected to the secure download page. Normally the download page will be up for 48 hours (depending on the online shopping program you use.)

 

If You Sell Tangible Goods

Several shopping cart programs allow you to upload pictures of your products and provide simple form fields where you add your pricing.
 

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Free Shopping Cart


The obvious advantage of using a free online hosted shopping cart is that it costs nothing. The drawback, however, is that it may not have that many features, so you should definitely think about using a paid shopping cart rather than a free one, depending on what you need.

 

Online Shopping Cart Features

Most e-commerce shopping cart programs will:

- Calculate packaging and shipping automatically
- Manage inventory automatically
- Create and manage discount codes
- Send instant notification when sales are made
- Integrate with PayPal, 2Checkout, and other third-party payment processors
- Allow you to sell and cross-sell
- Have an autoresponder
- Offer an affiliate module

 

So let’s review exactly what a shopping cart does again. When the customer reaches your online store and chooses products to buy, they are added to the shopping cart. The shopping cart collects the data on each product and calculates the total on the checkout page.

Before you select an online shopping cart host or software, you will need to obtain an Internet merchant account or use a third-party payment processor. You also need to make sure that the program integrates with your third-party payment processor or Internet merchant account.