What are online shopping carts?

Shopping carts are necessary part of doing business on the internet. They keep track of what the customer has put in their shopping cart and then collect all the shipping and billing information. You will still need a merchant account to process the orders and most companies offering shopping carts do not offer merchant accounts as well.

What are the options for online shopping carts?

There are two main options for shopping carts online - an online shopping cart service and shopping cart software for your server. Buying a shopping cart can be a good option, if you want to retain control over the look of your web page. It requires installing and configuring the shopping cart software on your server, but many of the people selling shopping cart software can help you through that process. This is the most professional option.

The other option is an online shopping cart service. This means that when customers click to oder your product on your web page, they will be taken to another web page that has your logo and the list of products they have selected. They will continue on that page to enter their shipping and billing information. Sometime the shopping cart can be customized to look more like your web page, but that is more difficult.

Many of the companies offering online shopping carts also offer the hosting of your web page. Besides the potential dollar savings from having the same place host your site and do your shopping cart, they will have tech support that will help you integrate your web page with the shopping cart. Otherwise, you might get bounced between the different tech support departments when sometime doesn't work.

Yahoo! Small Business has a service called Merchant Solutions, that is fairly reasonable in price for hosting and shopping cart services. They also have a full back end to manage your inventory. It can be a little difficult to set up, but they have a good tech support department that will help you for free. The main downside is that Yahoo! will charge you a transaction fee of .75% - 1.5% to run their service in addition to the monthly fee.

Microsoft BCentral also does hosting and shopping cart services. They are cheaper than Yahoo! and do not have the transaction fee. They are probably a better solution for someone that is setting up a small to medium business and doesn't want to pay a transaction fee.