Shopping Carts

A shopping cart gathers order information and then passes it on to a gateway, the Internet equivalent to a credit card swipe machine. The gateway passes the information to your merchant account that deposits the money into your bank.

Shopping Cart-gathers info and sends it to the gateway.

Gateway-receives order information and sends it to your merchant account.

Merchant Account-processes the information and authorizes the transfer of money into your bank.

Shopping Carts

There are two types of shopping carts. Hosted and, for lack of a better term "not hosted." With a Hosted shopping cart, the shopping cart software resides on someone elses server. This is analogous to a having a Yahoo e-mail account. You're using their software through your browser. Very quick and easy to set up.

Alternatively, you can buy shopping cart software and install it on the same server your own website resides. Thus you host your own shopping cart. Not quite so quick and wasy to set up, but can be cheaper and gives you much more flexibility.

The Specifics

Offsite (Hosted, ASP) Shopping Carts

PayPal provides a shopping cart, but you don't have to have a merchant account. This is a great way to get started and test the waters. But some will be offput by a PayPal shopping cart. It's a dead giveaway of a small operation. Nevertheless, this is a great service that can save you all those annoying monthly service fees. It's a free credit card acceptance service—save for a modest fee for each transaction. Feel free to demo it by paying me.

Signup with PayPal by clicking on the following graphic.

www.1shoppingcart.com My top recommendation at this point. $19-$69/mo.

Excellent Demo

or... https://www.ecartsoft.com

Click on image above and set up a demo account.

Class Exercise:

1. Set up an account with CartManager.
2. Try configuring all the different "Cart Settings" (Skip "Merchant Account.")
3. When you get to "Button Builders," add product info and generate the HTML.
4. Paste into the HTML view of a web page you've created.

this is a free shopping cart recommended by http://www.gorgeousbaskets.net/

http://www.2checkout.com
High interest rate, but low initial cost and no monthly fees.

Shopping Carts you install and host yourself

http://www.oscommerce.com/ is a free (open source) shopping cart that has received many good reviews.

It's quite a project to install and configure the cart, though. But the price is right.

X-Cart is another shopping cart that has received good reviews.