The Shopping Cart - THE WEBSITE - Electronic Commerce 101 - Building your Online Store's Website

If you plan on making the whole site using shopping cart software, which is basically a page template that uses a database to fill in the various parts of the page, it's critical that you look around and make sure you use a shopping cart that will meet your needs.

Shopping cart software can range from free to hundreds of dollars to purchase, and from free to monthly fees if you lease one from your hosting company. If you plan to sell online long term, it's worth it to own your shopping cart. If you want to change hosts in the future, sell your website, etc… it's much less complicated if you own your shopping cart. In addition, if you have webpage programming knowledge and own your cart, you can usually customize it to better suit your needs.

If you plan on creating your website yourself, or even if you don't but want your website to be found online and usable, I can not recommend highly enough the advice and people over at WebmasterWorld.. They are extremely knowledgeable in all aspects of websites, and are very friendly to those seeking help.

You can find free software online to build your shopping cart. Some of it may require a bit of a learning curve to setup, but most have excellent communities to assist those with questions. The two most popular free ones are OScommerce, and Zen Cart, which branched off from OScommerce.

There are also low to moderate priced shopping carts you can purchase that are usually easier to set up and better featured than the free ones. They also come with support available to assist you in setting them up, which can be very valuable if you run into problems. Most of the big online stores have either custom built shopping carts, which can be very expensive, or purchased carts that have been modified and customized.

One of the first choices that will help you decide what cart you want is what language your web server runs. Most web servers run either Linux or Windows Server software. Some carts will run only in Linux with PHP or CGI scripting, and some will run only in Windows with ASP scripting. Click here for a list of carts for both types.

When deciding what type of server you want, consider what else you may have on your website besides a shopping cart. Will you want information pages outside of the shopping cart? Forums? Blogs? There are all types of software for both kind of servers that each has its own features and benefits.