Setting up a Shopping Cart

An electronic shopping cart is pretty much a necessity for selling online, and there are literally thousands of choices ranging from free to expensive, simple to complex. I've helped set up a couple of low cost ones in the past, and found the lack of technical support and lax/non-existent documentation to be a real downer!

I recommend KickStartCart to most people(FREE 30 day trial), and its users tend to love it! Other suggestions are here.

KickstartCart is a breeze to setup.

Its quick start guide and video tutorials make it real easy. I set it up yesterday.

The cart itself took about 1 1/2 hours to setup, and that included a lot of experimentation.

It took maybe 4 hours to setup everything, including configuring a merchant account for accepting credit cards (which I'll blog on later) and writing a sales page on my Web site. I'm NOT a copywriter so this took some time.

I only added one item to my shopping cart so far, my booklet. Adding additional items will probably take 10 or 15 minutes maximum!

The one complicated part is setting up shipping -- shipping is complex. I screwed with this for maybe 4 hours after my cart was setup, experimenting with different options, and finally decided to bundle shipping into the price, a simple and wise choice!

Interestingly I got a call from a friend setting up KickStartCart at the same time, and I'll try to get his feedback and post or append here.