Friday, August 31, 2007

All About Shopping Carts

If you have a website that sells more than one product or service, you will need a shopping cart. A shopping cart allows the consumer to select as many items as they wish to buy and then pay for everything at once. If you only have a Buy Now button for each of your products, your customers will have to go through the payment process for each and every product they wish to purchase and you can lose a lot of sales this way.


However, having a shopping cart installed on your website can actually boost sales by encouraging visitors to keep browsing after they have decided to make a purchase. They can easily select two or more products before signing out and a shopping cart system makes it easy to pay online for all the items in the cart at once.


There is no need to program your own cart program, in fact many web hosts that are aimed at providing service to ebusiness owners already have shopping carts available for you to use. All you need to provide is a merchant account and the prices for everything you want to sell! This is a very easy way to go about setting up an e-store, but you might want more flexibility than the standard host package gives you.


While it might look tempting to pick up a free shopping cart program, there are a few things to keep in mind before you choose one. You often get what you pay for, and that could mean a system that lets you down if you go with a free one.


Services such as PayPal often include free shopping carts with their accounts and tend to be fairly reliable, although they might not have as many features as you would like. What they lack in flexibility is made up for with ease of use, however, since you simply enter some basic data like product name and price and copy the HTML that is produced onto your site for an instant shopping cart button.


A paid shopping cart may charge an initial set up fee or simply per transaction. These usually offer a wide array of options and you can fully customize them. You do need to have some form of merchant account in order to use a paid shopping cart, though. This allows you to connect your account to your new shopping cart and transactions will be done through the merchant account.


A shopping cart is something that you will most certainly need if you plan to make money online with more than just one product or service. You can start out with a free one, if you like, and upgrade later, but it is a necessary part of ebusiness.


Michael D. Copper Your Online Business Coach http://www.course-internet-marketing.com

osCommerce Shopping Cart - Is It the Best Product on the Market?

As you go about the task of developing and designing a website for your Net based business, you will find yourself stewing over what sort of shopping cart program to incorporate and integrate into your website. This can be a very complicated, challenging and even frustrating task. There are so many different shopping cart software programs on the market today that choosing which one will be right for your particularly operation can be a daunting task. One of the most popular shopping cart software programs on the market today is the osCommerce Shopping Cart. You may have heard more that a few times that the osCommerce Shopping Cart is the best product in the market. Through this article, you will be provided with some basic information to assist you in making the determination as to whether or not the osCommerce Shopping Cart is the right choice for you.


Keep in mind that while you are provided specific information about osCommerce Shopping Cart, nothing in this article should be construed as being an endorsement of osCommerce Shopping Cart. You need to do your own independent homework before making a decision to purchase any software application, including osCommerce Shopping Cart.


First of all, the osCommerce Shopping Cart has proven reliability time after time. As mentioned, it is a popular brand of shopping cart today. The history of a product is one of the best indications of its overall reliability and the osCommerce Shopping Cart has a solid track record thus far.


Second, the osCommerce Shopping Cart has proven to be quite adaptable in different types of settings. In other words, the osCommerce Shopping Cart has proven to be a good product whether or not you’ve got a small or a large retail operation on the Net. Adaptability is an important consideration particularly if you are starting or already involved in an Internet business that you hope will grow over time. You will want a shopping cart software program that will grow with your own business.


Third, the osCommerce Shopping Cart is accompanied with a reliable system of customer services and technical support. Because in so many ways the shopping cart program you select really will be the heart and soul of your business enterprise, it is important that you select a program that comes with the backing of outstanding customer service and technical support. Generally speaking, when it comes to customer service and technical support, osCommerce Shopping Cart has consistently obtained high marks.


By: Angel Abdulnor