If your website requires a shopping cart function, there are two basic types of shopping cart solutions available. Hosted shopping carts allow you to integrate a shopping cart with your websites e-commerce function, but the cart itself is hosted and maintained on the shopping cart vendors’ server. Licensed shopping cart solutions are purchased or obtained from a vendor, but customized by you (or your developer) and maintained on your web hosting server. You would generally purchase a license shopping cart, but there are a few free, open source solutions available as well. Your decision to select a licensed or hosted cart should be dependent on your business type, your budget and the technical resources available to you.

IMPORTANT: Prior to reviewing shopping carts, you should have a list of all of the features that you need to include on your website (ex: gift certificates, coupons, inventory management etc.).

Here are a few pros and cons of Hosted vs. Licensed shopping carts:

Hosted shopping carts

Pros:

• Maintenance free solution. The hosting company is responsible for server backups, server/application maintenance, upgrades and troubleshooting.
• Generally quick to setup (depending on the # of products)
• Hosting solution will include ecommerce web hosting

Cons:

• Hosted solutions generally incur monthly fees ($9.99/month and up depending on provider)
• Generally not as flexible if complex customizations are needed.
• With some hosted carts, your customers will be transferred to another domain for payment processing.

Examples of Hosted Shopping Cart Providers:

• Paypal Website Pro
• Homestead Storefront
• 1ShoppingCart
• 2Checkout

IMPORTANT: Shopping carts provide the interface for customers to select/update the items they wish to purchase. The shopping cart transfers the ordering details to the payment gateway when the customer is ready to CHECKOUT.

Licensed shopping carts: Buy your own cart and custom to your specifications

Pros:

• No monthly fees for hosting the cart (generally)
• Highly customizable layouts
• Greater Flexibility in altering features/functionality and integrating 3^rd party tools

Cons:

• Requires higher upfront costs (fee to purchase the cart + license, SSL certificate, costs to customize/setup the cart to work on your website)
• Requires technical expertise to setup and integrate with existing website and database(s)
• Web hosting solution (operating system) will determine the shopping carts that can run on your web server.
• Requires technical expertise to troubleshoot if problems occur.
• Technical support may not be readily available for open source, free carts.

Examples of Licensed Shopping Cart Providers:

• WebAssist eCart
• ProductCart
• ZenCart
• Miva Merchant

Join/fan the Websmith Group on Facebook or subscribe to our eNewsletter.