:: e-commerce ::
One of the most powerful things for a web site to do is to accept payment and therefore help your business grow 24/7 (while you are sleeping too!). No matter you provide a service or sell products, taking credit card payment on your web site is as easy as sending an email today. If you have a Paypal account, you can invoice anyone with an email address anywhere in the world. Anyone with a credit card can pay you over the internet without a Paypal account too. So how do you choose a shopping cart that works for you?
Currently there are a few options for shopping cart integration that I can help you with - Paypal (Website Payments Standard), Google Checkout (ideal for single product/service shopping cart or open-amount credit card processing), Yahoo Store (good for larger shopping cart with admin system) or 1shoppingcart (most powerful tool of them all in my opinion).
Services and costs vary depending on the provider of your choice and the size of your cart:
To help you choose from the different shopping cart services I currently provide, some of things you should consider first are:
{} your budget - how much you can spend monthly,
{} how many products or items you have, and
{} how you plan to maintain the cart and your HTML skill/level,
{} how frequent you need to update the cart,
{} how customized (design) you like your cart (and your site) to be
| Cart |
Size of Cart |
Maintenance |
Cost of cart |
design flexibility |
| Paypal |
small (50-) |
some HTML |
transaction base, no monthly fees |
100% customized |
|
| Google Checkout |
single item or service |
no HTML |
transaction base, no monthly fees |
100% customized |
|
| Yahoo Store |
large |
no HTML |
transaction base + monthly fees |
(template-based) little |
|
| 1shoppingcart |
larger |
some HTML |
transaction base + monthly fees |
100% customized |
Keep in mind most of these carts accept Paypal too (as a way of taking credit card payment). Paypal is a fast and easy way to accept credit card payment if you want to keep your monthly cost down (without paying for your own merchant account). However Paypal (listed as the first option here) is standard Paypal cart built in HTML on your site so there is no back-end admin system. Some of these carts come with a back end admin system so you can manage your cart without HTML skills but you will have to compromise between customization and amount of HTML you have to deal with. In general the more customization you do the less user friendly the maintenance process become for you. If you have HTML skills or if you are willing to learn, then you should explore them and compare based on the cost. I do not recommend using a totally and manually HTML built cart (such as Paypal) if you have over 100 items.
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