Shopping Carts
Most ecommerce sites use a shopping cart. The shopping cart links a website with a payment gateway. Typically the shopping cart is a database where all the product information is stored. When a customer is browsing the site, a cookie stores which products have been added to the cart.
There are a couple of ways to add a shopping cart to a website.
Hosted Shopping Carts
There are many companies offering licensed shopping carts, which are normally hosted on their own secure server. By paying for this service you should get better customer support than a free solution. These kind of carts are generally easier to set up. All of the product information is entered on the hosting companies site. You then receive "add to basket" HTML code for each product which can be inserted in the relevant page.
Here are some paid hosted shopping carts
Installable Shopping Carts
Most of the free shopping carts require you to install the cart yourself. This means there are some requirements of your web hosting you may need to check before you jump in. Some of the Zen-Cart requirements are Apache server, PHP and a MySQL database, and a SSL secure server. All of these are provided by decent quality hosting companies.
The main pitfall of using a free installable shopping cart is there will be no dedicated customer service. Many of the popular free services have a large user community though. These are great for finding help with installation and maintenance.
Here are a few totally free shopping carts
Posted by Tom on Wed 10th Dec 2008
