Can Shopping Carts Really Be (Almost) Free?

Setting up shopping carts for ecommerce is part of my experience as a Virtual Assistant.

When you are just getting into ecommerce and don’t have a huge budget to spend on monthly payments for a really great shopping cart, you may not realize that you have some budget friendly options.

Of course, you can go with opensource software like oscommerce http://www.oscommerce.com/ and zencart http://www.zencart.com/ but you do have to be a bit of a techy to set them up and you also have to have a merchant account to be able to accept credit cards online.

Here are some of the best options for easy and inexpensive payment processing options.

1. PayPal. Everyone is familiar with PayPal. You can set up your account and get your buy now button on your e-store in a jiffy. If you have a business account, you can customize your customer’s shopping experience by adding your logo to the payment page. Of course, you can send your customers to a thank you page when they finish their purchase and can have other products on that page for a productive “upsell.”

PayPal will take a small percentage off your sale. You can link your bank account and transfer your funds.

2. Google Checkout works much in the same way as PayPal. The only difference I have found is that Google Checkout “masks” the customer’s email so you are unable to collect emails for your ezine. Another downside to Google Checkout is that it is unavailable at this time to Canadians. I am sure that will change!

3. Mals-e.com has both a free and a premium version. You can link it to your PayPal account or to a merchant account for credit card processing. Mals-e also has a built in affiliate program and you can also link in third party affiliate programs.

4. Check your hosting provider. Quite often you will have the option to add simple shopping carts to your site along with the hosting. Some of these link in with PayPal but most do require you to have a merchant account.

5. If you are just selling eproducts, you may want to sign up for a Clickbank account http://www.clickbank.com/index.html.

If you anticipate high sales and require autoresponders instead of thank you pages to deliver the product to your customers, you may want to consider signing up for a paid service like 1shoppingcart http://www.1shoppingcart.com and getting a merchant account to process those credit cards.

It is always a good idea to sit down and plan your marketing strategy so that you don’t have to change the procedure mid-way through the year. If you are just starting out have just a few products you can sell online within your budget.