Shopping cart Options for Website Owners
Business owners looking for shopping cart solutions need to explore all the shopping cart options. Shopping cart options include open source carts, third party solutions, and total shopping cart solutions.
Open source shopping carts are based on the popular OS Commerce application which are easy to install and generally do not include technical know-how. Usually open source carts are packed with features. Typically the interface is uncomplicated and easy to navigate. The open source is usually a great cart for beginners to install yet has all the features that website owners need.
The most popular third-party shopping cart solution is Paypal which offers several shopping cart solutions for small and large website owners. The basic Paypal shopping cart is free, but does require that your website buyers use Paypal to pay for their purchases on your Website. Paypal charges you a fee to use their service, but their fees are reasonable. The Paypal cart is fairly easy to install on your Website and easy for your visitors to use. Paypal gives your visitors several payment options using Paypal’s secure payment system. It allows customers to use major credit cards without disclosing financial information, which gives your customers a real sense of security, and trust in using your site for their purchase needs.
A shopping cart option that is a total solution is one in which your online shopping cart is built from the ground up to your specifications assuring that your shopping cart will integrate with your merchant account’s processing gateway. Make sure that your shopping cart software is compatible with all the major payment gateways that you and your customers will want to use.
When looking at button options for your shopping cart consider that the Paypal button cart is best for when you will be handling quick orders or single item transactions. The full service cart is ideal for multiple purchases or when choices will be given such as color or size. Google checkout button cart is used when you allow customers to conduct transactions through Google’s secure server, ideal for quick orders of single items. Paypal and Google make offering checkout to your customers that are easy and secure.
Take a good look at your potential customers to see what shopping cart option will be best for your website. Think about all of the different transactions that your customers will need to conduct and make sure that your choice in shopping cart will allow for all of these transactions.
