If you want to sell online, you need a shopping cart
to take the orders and process the payments. There are two
basic types of shopping carts, Hosted and Licensed. Let's
discover the differences and how they affect your decision.
Hosted Shopping Carts
Hosted shopping carts, like
www.ecompal.com charge a monthly fee and handle all the
collection of names, addresses, credit card information and so on.
They take care of the secure certificates and all the database
handling.
You create links from your site to the shopping cart.
Usually, the number of items you're selling is limited.
Although one of my clients has over 500 items she's selling.
That's not the norm.
Licensed Shopping Carts
Licensed shopping carts, like zencart, usually have a one time
fee, although there may be upgrades they charge for. The
shopping cart runs on your website and all the collection of
information is done on your site. You and/or your developer
are responsible for the secure certificates and the database
maintenance. One advantage is that with some of the carts you
can maintain inventories and have very large databases of products. |
