Beginners Guide to eCommerce - 'Shopping Cart Software'
by Palyn Peterson

This is a tool that allows customers to put items into a "basket" and then check out, buying all items in one transaction. Most online malls, like Yahoo! Stores, provide this. 

A lot of merchant accounts offer shopping cart software with your subscription to them, others don't. Even if they do offer shopping cart software, most likely you don't have to use it.   You may not want to, even.

Make sure that customers can easily add or remove items, update quantities, and understand the whole process.  Also make sure that the software will allow you to add variables such as t-shirt size and color if that is going to be part of your business.

Yahoo! Stores is the way to go. Their shopping cart is state of the art, it will do everything you need and it does it well. Your Yahoo! Store is integrated with it automatically, and you don't need to configure it at all to use it. All you need to do is email Yahoo! Stores support the MID and TID numbers you get from your merchant account provider of choice, and they set it up for you.

For the price and features, this is where you want to be. And don't think you'll be stuck with using templates in order to use their shopping cart, they have snippets of code you can place on your handmade web pages to insert an "order" button, the description, the price, options and whatever info you want. In fact, you can go even further. If you look at the HTML code of a Yahoo! Stores product page, you can disect the <Form> HTML tag the shopping cart uses, grab the necessary information and literally make your webpage look however you desire. If you are selling a stores worth of products, I STRONGLY suggest you use Yahoo! Stores.

However, if you don't want to, here are other options. The following 2 suggestions are an "all-inclusive" shopping cart, meaning the company provides the shopping cart as well as the merchant account to process the credit cards.

PayPal offers very simple shopping cart software. You can have options with your items, but the options can not affect the price of the items. It used to be that people had to sign up with PayPal to order from you, but that isn't true anymore. Seriously consider them. Not only are they providing you shopping cart software, but they process the credit cards as well.

2Checkout also has a great shopping cart. Their shopping cart can do all the basics, and they have good rates for accepting credit cards. Go there and check em out.

These next suggestions are shopping cart software ONLY. Meaning they do not come with a merchant account. You will need to setup your merchant account with the software manually, or pay someone to do it. These shopping carts are not for those unfamiliar HTML or script installation/modifying.

OScommerce is a FREE shopping cart software. It is open-source, so thousands of people have written "modules" you can "plug" into the basic OScommerce installation to enhance it. The one thing I don't like about it is that it uses it's own VERY cluttered interface. It takes major customization to get looking like your own site. One thing I did when I was experimenting with this cart is disect the HTML of a product page, and then on a page I created I placed the necessary HTML code to order the product. It worked, but it took too much time and effort for it to be a solution. So if you don't mind the way it looks, or don't mind spending the time to customize it then it is a good one to look at. Click here to go to its homepage. Click here to go to the support forum.

CubeCart is another free shopping cart. Again, you'll need to spend a lot of time customizing it to look like your site. Click here to go to its homepage. Click here to go to the support forum.

AgoraCart is yet another free shopping cart. Click here to go to its homepage.