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.

Unrelated, but some sites I like are Canon Photo Printer and Rubber Stair Treads and also Hoover Carpet Cleaner.

Comments

[Deepak]

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?

[T Demop, Blogging for Business]

Hi Deepak,

I'm in tax free NH and not familiar with any free/cheap carts that can handle multiple tax rates easily.
http://www.mals-e.com Mal's cart is one to look at -- they do sales tax well I'm told, but again, no personal or with my clients experience here

[SBL Shopping Cart applications]

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.

[Joelchrist]

You are right. there are lots of shopping cart software available in markets, some of them are fake. Zeuscart is the best online shopping cart script i prefer to you all guys. try this out.

[joanna]

I am sure that most of us are already aware of this but I would like to stress to anyone accepting cards or planning to do so- the PCI DSS compliance regulations that are taking place which will especially affect merchants level 4. Most merchants that store, processes or transmit cardholder data must be compliant by now. However, by July 2010 any merchant that is not PCI compliant, including Level 4 merchants,will be de-certified and must stop accepting cards.Level 4 Merchants are defined as those with fewer than 20,000 Visa transactions per year. Most small vendors will fall into this category. As of July 2010 if you are level 4 merchant you either are PCI compliant or you will no longer able to accept payments.

[T Demop, Blogging for Business]

Joanna,
PCI simply does not apply to many. If you never handle CCdata, like if you're using KickStartCart (link above), PCI does not apply.

This is a great reason to use such a solution for smaller merchants. I'd never want to deal with PCI regulations myself, even though I have helped clients (I do a LOT of security consulting)