Knowing what you need in your online shopping cart solution is the first step in choosing a free shopping cart. Whether you need to have the transaction records kept elsewhere, or you need a company to help you with credit card transactions, there is a free shopping cart solution available. You may even be able to decide how you want to process your credit card payments, depending on which shopping cart solution you choose. You may decide that you need to be able to upload from a database on your home computer instead of having to manually input all your items, but even then there’s a free shopping cart solution available.
You may decide that no matter what free shopping cart solution you choose, you want to be sure that your website looks different from your competitors’ websites, or that the shopping cart area of your website matches the rest of your website. Another consideration is how shipping charges will be calculated and added to your products once your customer places an order. Some shopping cart systems don’t allow you to set the shipping price to change depending on what item is ordered. Decide on the features that you want in a shopping cart system, and then choose one that suits your needs.
The final consideration is to be sure that there is some type of customer support if you’re going to be installing your free shopping cart solution yourself. Even web developers sometimes have problems with installing and configuring shopping carts. If you’re trying to save money by doing everything yourself, you’ll want to be sure that you can use the shopping cart system with your web server, and that you’ll be able to get help if you have problems with configuring the shopping cart system. Several solutions don’t have any applications that need to be installed on your web server. One example is the PayPal™ shopping cart solution.
Free Shopping Cart Solution Scripts
One of the oldest free shopping cart solutions available is the Commerce CGI shopping cart system available at http://www.commerce-cgi.com/. This perl script would be installed directly on your website, allowing you to use your own website host without any issues. Depending on which add-on modules you choose, your website host may need to install some features onto the server, so you may not want to use this shopping cart solution if you’re using a large website host such as GoDaddy. You would put your products in the product database and upload the database to the website. The Commerce CGI shopping cart system allows you to have an unlimited number of items in your website shopping cart. Additionally, the same company offers either an HTML or a MySQL free shopping cart solution. Though you can’t get support through the company directly, you can get support for your shopping cart through the bulletin board system known as a BBS or through their mailing list.
Zen Cart™ Ecommerce is an open source free shopping cart solution available at http://www.zen-cart.com/. This shopping cart system uses PHP programming, so you need to be sure that your website host supports PHP scripts. Generally, if your website host doesn’t currently support PHP scripting, it’s easy enough for it to be installed no matter what type of server is being used. The Zen Cart™ shopping cart system can use PayPal™ for payment processing, or you can choose to process your credit card payments with a merchant account with another processing gateway. Additionally, the Zen Cart™ shopping cart system is open source, which means if you have the knowledge, you can alter the shopping cart system to fit your needs without much trouble.
Free Shopping Cart Solutions Hosted Elsewhere
Another free shopping cart solution would be the PayPal™ shopping cart available through http://www.paypal.com. Their help files walk you through the process of setting up the shopping cart, but you’ll have to do a few things separately. The PayPal™ shopping cart system works best if you know HTML or are comfortable editing the HTML on your website. Since you’ll have to create separate “Add to Cart” buttons for each item, you won’t be able to use a database to display the items in your shopping cart. However, there are a few features that more than make up for this drawback. For example, many people know and trust PayPal™, so you know your customers will feel secure ordering through the PayPal™ website. Additionally, PayPal™ makes it easy to process credit card orders, so you don’t need to have a separate merchant account elsewhere to process the credit card orders.
Mal’s e-commerce free shopping cart solution available on their website at http://www.mals-e.com/ is set up on your website similar to the PayPal™ shopping cart solution. You set up the individual items on your website, and then you add an “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button next to the items. Once your customer clicks on the button, the information on the item they are interested in is sent to the Mal’s e-commerce website to be placed in their shopping cart. Once your customer is ready to check out, you can either have their payments processed through PayPal™ or through a number of other payment processing companies including Moneybookers, Paymate, or Nochex. Though PayPal™ might be the most well known payment website, Moneybookers might be considered the next PayPal™. You may decide that you want to use Moneybookers because some have expressed concern over the security of PayPal™.
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