Shopping Cart Tutorials

Easy DIY Shopping Carts- Finding easy do it yourself shopping carts is pretty easy, but you need to make sure the free shopping cart has everything you need. A lot of the easy DIY shopping carts are included in cheap web hosting plans.

While all shopping cart programs seem alike, there are some differences. Perhaps the most important decision you have when you are looking for the best shopping cart program is how much work you want to do in terms of setting it up. Custom shopping carts can potentially offer you more customized features but are also costly and difficult to set up. Easy do it yourself shopping carts are quite sufficient for most online stores and are relatively cheap if not free. Yes there are free shopping carts!

Some of the easy DIY shopping carts that Website Shopping Cart recommends are considered to be plug-ins. Shopping cart plug-ins is shopping cart software that is easily installed to your website from your webhosting control panel. The cPanel control panel is great for shopping cart plug-ins. Some of the more shopping cart plug-ins are made by ZenCart, osCommerce, AgoraCart, and ShopSite.

ZenCart- ZenCart is one of the easiest shopping cart programs to install onto your eCommerce website. Because ZenCart is an open source program, you will find it for free on many of the best web hosts. Here are some of the features of the ZenCart shopping cart program.

• Unlimited product catalog
• Unlimited categories
• XHTML template system
• Unlimited extra pages
• Multiple ad banner controller
• Multiple shipping options
• Multiple payment options
• Newsletter manager
• Acept coupons and gift certificates
• Display featured products
• Offer quantity discounts
• Accept credit cards, debit cards, or PayPal

Best ZenCart Web Hosting Provider: BlueHost

osCommerce- osCommerce has been in the shopping cart industry for a few years. There are currently over 14,000 online stores using osCommerce shopping cart software. Just like the other shopping cart plug-ins that Website Shopping Cart is discussing in this article, osCommerce is free! Here are some of the osCommerce shopping cart features:

• Compatible with PHP
• Multilanguage support including English, German, and Spanish.
• Easy set up of shopping cart template
• Support for dynamic images
• Supports unlimited products and categories
• Easily backup and restore the database
• Easily print invoices and packaging lists
• Statistics for products and customers
• Multicurrency support
• Automatically updates currency exchange rates
• Address book feature for the customers
• Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
• Secure transactions with SSL
• Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
• Automated display of specials
• Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
• Accept offline payment processing
• Accept online payment processing
• Real-time shipping rates quotes
• Free shipping based on amount and destination
• Auto tax calculation

Best osCommerce Web Hosting Provider: JustHost

AgoraCart- First released in 2000, AgoraCart has grown to be on the best shopping cart programs. Easy to install, yet offers all the necessary shopping cart tools for a complex online store. AgoraCart is written in the MySQL/PHP scripting language so it is compatible with most control panels. Here are some of the AgoraCart shopping cart features:

• CSS (Cascading style sheets) manager
• Online store templates
• Unlimited products
• Unlimited categories
• Search box
• Auto tax calculation
• Discount codes
• HTML order forms
• Accept multiple forms of payment
• Supports shared and dedicated SSL certificates
• Invoice/Packing slip printing
• Sales and inventory reports
• Real time shipping costs
• Online store management tools

Best AgoraCart Web Hosting Provider: iPage

ShopSite shopping cart- One of the easiest shopping cart programs to set up. In fact ShopSite states that you can have your shopping cart software all installed and running within 15 minutes! With three different ShopSite shopping carts to choose from you can surely find the right one for you. Here are the basic features of the ShopSite shopping carts:

• 15 product catalog with ability to upgrade to unlimited products
• Search engine friendly pages
• Online store setup wizard
• HTML editor
• Store statistics
• Secure order management
• CVV2 fraud protection
• Google checkout
• PayPal
• Does not require cookies
• All orders can be verified by humans
• Real time credit card processing
• Email marketing
• Dual currency support
• Accept eChecks
• Accept checks
• Accept credit cards
• Auto tax calculation

Best ShopSite Web Hosting Provider: FatCow

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