Shopping carts for blogs: specific recommendations

Selling products online requires some way to let people buy and some way to charge them.

An electronic shopping cart lets people indicate what they want to buy, and a "merchant account" lets you accept credit cards. Very few potential customers will make a phone call or mail/fax an order form. Without a shopping cart you'll lose over 90% of your potential customers. You'll also lose most of your sales if you require customers to mail a check or similar.

An electronic shopping cart operates with a physical shopping cart metaphor. As you shop, you add items to your shopping cart and when finished you check out. Checking out involves entering payment, e.g. credit card, info and clicking some sort of "buy" button.

Shopping carts are complicated as there are literally thousands available, ranging from free to very cheap. It is very confusing, and one size does not fit all! You could build your own shopping also, but that is not recommended for about 99% of everyone – you could build your own blogging software too, but few people do.

With few exceptions, you'll also need a "Merchant Account," which allows you to actually accept and process credit cards. You'll be charged monthly fees, setup fees, gateway fees, flat and percentage fee per transaction, and probably more. It's much more complicated than it needs to be, but the bottom line is that you can do something basic for free or close to free, and for $500-$1000 a year you can have everything you need with all the bells and whistles that help you sell more efficiently - i.e. make more money.

Specific recommendations:
PayPal (officially "PayPal Website Payments Standard") – a great simple choice. NO merchant account necessary. No fees at all if you don't sell anything. PayPal has a simple shopping cart built-in. PayPal is a good choice if you have one or very few items for sale. It's cheap, it's basic, it works. However, it just takes orders – it doesn't help you sell. Also many people have never heard of PayPal, for example my parents and sister, and are understandably reticent about using it.

If you sell only one or two products and have no plans to ever expand, PayPal is great! If you are serious about Internet commerce you need a more full featured solution.

• One that allows you to upsell - suggest related products to someone ordering; hey they've already got their credit card out and are in a mood to buy!
• A cart that lets you offer discounts and coupons, which can greatly increase sales.
• One with built in associate program capabilities, that lets other sell for you and automatically tracks commissions.

KickStartCart is a fantastic choice. Many of my friends and clients use it, and you'll see it in use here before long. It does all of the above, and it's a "hosted solution" – the software runs on KickStartCart's servers so there is no software to install and configure.

• It also handles your email lists, shipping and tax calculations, etc.
• It really does just about everything to help run an Internet business.
• The 30 day free trial and 24/7 included phone support is the clincher for most people

A couple of other choices people rave about is Mals Shopping Cart (free or cheap) and Miva Merchant which costs roughly the same as KickStartCart, and is great if you have lots of different items, for example thousands, for sale. I have no personal experience with these.

Look carefully at shopping carts and remember that switching carts is a severe nuisance and time waste. PayPal is cheap and simple and works. KickStartCart is a more serious solutions that helps you sell products and run your Internet business.

Addendum:
Check out the free ebook How to Pick a Shopping Cart System that Makes You Money.

Comments

[Ralph Johnston]

We've used KickStartCart to totally automate our business - not just shopping cart, but email integration, database, autoresponders and more. Stuff we had never heard of just 3 months ago that helps us SELL!

There are cheaper options available, but we wanted to concentrate on business and selling, not configuring and tweaking software. We almost went with a free shopping cart (with no support of course) and PayPal to process CCs, and that might have been OK, but KickStartCart is just amazing.

KickStartCart is designed for the Internet Entreprenuer, whether fledgling or seasoned, and we couldn't run our business without it!

[Denise aka The Blog Squad]

The Blog Squad both uses and recommends KickStartCart as well. It is the most integrated system and is more a marketing system than just a shopping cart. You can also use PayPal with KickStartCart instead of or in addition to a regular merchant account.

Two thumbs up for KickStartCart.

[Marti]

I've used the Paypal cart and it was pretty easy for a not-really-technical person to set up.
Very helpful post! Thanks for sharing!

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Thanks Denise! Yes, it really is an integrated marketing system, and everyone using it speaks highly of it.

Thanks Marti! PayPal is not bad either -- especially if you have one or two items to sell, or want to avoid the expense/hassle of getting a merchant account. And as Denise points out you can use PayPal as a (or "the") payment option with KickStartCart

[shopping cart]

Mals and Miva get a lot of attention because they are "cheap" unless you need to pay osmeone to set it up, modify it, or fix it; so I would recommend KickstartCart as well, amonst other higher end hosted solutions.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Cheap solutions are OK -- I LIKE cheap. But often you get what you pay for. When you're planning on eventually selling more than one or two items, want things like discounts/coupons, tracking email addresses, affiliate programs, etc. if gets VERY complicated (and sometimes expensive) with the "cheap" solutions.

[pdshop asp]

there are many shopping cart solutions that are affordable, that are worth looking into, like pdshop for asp capable windows servers.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Hey pdshop,

Thanks for stopping by. Yes, many solutions out there, with different levels of service and that fill different niches. I'm not personally familiar with yours but going to go and check it out now.

[Jacqueline McK]

Any recommendations for a cheap and very simple shopping cart that works with Paypal but that also allows for the many sales tax rates of NY State?

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Hi Jacqueline,
PayPal has a built in shopping cart and a wizard to help configure it, and it *may* be able (with some work on your part no doubt) to handle that. As I'm in "tax free" New Hampshire (don't ask about the real estate tax!), and don't have clients with your issues I'm not sure, but that is something to explore. My Web site guy describes the PayPal wizard as pretty sophisticated.