Some of Easy and Affordable eCommerce Shopping Cart for Your Business

Anyone interested in selling products online might find the prospect of designing a website storefront with a shopping cart and credit card processing intimidating. At one time, creating an online store required programming knowledge and lots of money. But today, there are many easy to use and affordable, full-service e-commerce providers perfect for the small or home-based business.

Not sure what to expect from an e-commerce software provider? For the most part, providers offer shopping cart solutions for your new or existing web site, allowing you to easily build, edit, and maintain your online shop, and collect orders without any programming or HTML knowledge.

Most providers offer everything you need, including hosting, templates and more, or you can integrate them into your existing website. Most of these offer payment gateways and use of their credit card services, as well as allow you to use PayPal. Some charge transaction or set-up fees and others don't. They all offer a free trial, which gives you the chance to test them all to find the one that best suits your needs.

Here affordable solutions for opening a small e-commerce store:

 

Volusion  

 

Volusion is my top recommendation, not only for the low price, but all the bells and whistles that come along with its affordability. There is ample support, fraud protection for your customers, options for credit card processing as well as accepting PayPal payments, and many website templates to choose from. Further, it offers responsive design, mobile e-commerce and social media integration (i.e. Facebook store). Basically, Volusion offers everything you could want or need to run a successful and effective e-commerce store. Volution offers many plans starting at only $14 per month (you can test it with a free 14-day trial). 

The lowest cost plan features:

• $14 per mo (free 14-day trial)
• 100 Products
• Unlimited Storage
• No Transaction Fees
• 1GB Bandwidth
• Online Support
• Mobile Commerce
• Responsive Templates
• Free Slideshow
• Mobile App
• Facebook Store
• Social Media Tools
• Automatic Tax Rates
• And more

Other packages offer more products, bandwidth and bells, and whistles so you can pick the option that best fits your needs.

Shopify 

 

Shopify is also another top recommendation because it is so customizable. Within the typical e-commerce solution and hosting, there is a Shopify App store (much like Apple's) which allows you to shop for and select add-on applications for your Shopify site. For example, Shopify offers to buy buttons for Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. It provides everything you need or you can integrate into your existing website or store. It offers mobile options as well. In addition, you get great support, fraud protection, options for credit card processing and many website templates to choose from.

Plans start at $29 per month but that includes unlimited products and 24/7 support. 

• Starts at $29 per mo
• Free trial
• Unlimited products
• 24/7 Support
• Discount codes
• Website/Blog
• 100+ themes
• Mobile commerce
• Social media integration
• Email marketing
• and more.

Other plans provide more features. A less expensive plan, Shopify Lite, lets you sell on Facebook for $9 per month. 

Big Commerce 

 

Big Commerce is another well-priced and fully stocked e-commerce service provider. It offers fraud protection, varying credit card processing features and a wide selection of website design themes, including responsive design, and mobile e-commerce. It also offers a wide range of support options and the ability to show product images in varying ways. Big Commerce offers unlimited products, storage and bandwidth, and the ability to sell on Pinterest and Facebook, as well as Google Stores on the bigger, Pro and Enterprise plans.

The least expensive plan features:

• $29.95 per month (15-day free trial)
• Unlimited products
• Sales up to $50k per year
• 24.7 live agent support
• 100+ design templates
• Social media connectivity
• Mobile e-commerce
• And more

3DCart 

 

3Dcart is an e-commerce solution targeting those who wish to sell a larger amount of products. It includes many of the bells and whistles as the other providers such as mobile e-commerce, social media integration and more.

 

 

The Mini Plan offers:

• $19.99 per month (you can test with a free trial)
• 200 products
• Up to 4000 visits a month
• $25 in free ad credits
• Social media connectivity
• No transaction fees
• 24/7 tech support

Other plans allow for more products and visits, plus additional features such as live chat, Quickbook connector, and integration with Amazon and eBay.

Fortune3 

 

Like other providers, Fortune3 offers everything you'd need to set up an e-commerce store with six plans to choose from starting at $9.95 a month. A few other providers offer gift cards, and Fortune3 give you the ability to sell and accept gift certificates. Plus there is Facebook shopping integration, email marketing, and the ability to create an affiliate program. What's different from other providers, is that Fortune# includes all features in all plans. The difference between the plans is the number of products. The two most expensive plans have set up fees as well.

   

 

 

The Starter plan features:

• $9.95 per month (30-day free trial) 
• 20 products
• Unlimited support
• No Set-up Fee
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth
• No transaction fee when you use Fortune3 credit card services

  Originally Published at www.thebalancesmb.com

Add a Shopping Cart to Your Website

If your business already has a website and you're ready to sell products online, you may worry about needing to start your website over from scratch. This can be discouraging — after all, you've probably already spent a lot of time and effort on your website. Or maybe you paid a professional designer to build your site for you, and full redesign just isn't in your budget. Either way, your customers are already used to a certain look and feel for your website, and you may not want to unexpectedly change that!

Fortunately, it's easy to add shopping cart to a website without changing your existing design, even if you're not experienced with the technical aspects of website creation. In fact, there are several ways you can accomplish this.
You can add an online store catalog that works alongside your website and connect it to your main website with very little editing to your original site. Or, if you're comfortable working with HTML code, you can add products directly to any page of your website as you see fit.
This article will explain how.

What is a shopping cart?

An online shopping cart is software that provides the necessary features for customers to make a retail purchase from your website. Some shopping cart software is quite simplistic and only adds the bare essentials, like products and a checkout page. Other shopping cart software goes the extra mile and includes features for you to provide your customers with an improved shopping experience. The best shopping cart software comes with other eCommerce tools for running your business.

Parts of shopping cart software

Much like a cash register in a brick-and-mortar store, shopping cart software comprises the customer-facing side and the employee- or business-facing side.

The customer-facing component is often called the frontend or the storefront and consists of the online store that customers browse. The administration side is usually called the backend, the admin, the dashboard, or the control panel. Together, the frontend and the backend of the software work to allow customers to place orders and you to process those orders.

As mentioned, very basic shopping cart software provides a method to purchase products and make payments. Advanced shopping cart software can include additional features like:

• A virtual cart that allows customers to select multiple products at once before checkout
• A "View Cart" page for reviewing the selected items
• Individual pages for each product, complete with pictures and an easy-to-navigate layout for product information
• Categories and subcategories to organize products and make it easier for customers to find them
• Search functionality to help customers find products instantly
• Extra product page information, like product reviews and a customer Q&A
• Extra pages for displaying store policies and business information
• A built-in blog feature for posting news, updates, and other valuable content (essential if your current website doesn't already include a blog)

An advanced shopping cart's backend can include features such as:

• Order management and sales reporting
• Inventory control with stock quantity alerts
• Shipping integrations, e.g. real-time rate calculations and label printing
• A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) for logging all interactions with customers
• Marketing tools, such as email newsletters
• A large selection of integrated payment gateways
• Sales tax calculation
• Social media integration for exporting/synchronizing products to a Facebook Shop
• Other marketplace integrations, e.g. Amazon and eBay
• Integrations to connect the shopping cart with your preferred business software, such as QuickBooks

As you can see from these examples, the more advanced shopping cart software goes far beyond the simple "checkout" functionality and becomes more like a centralized software-based hub for running your entire business. When a shopping cart contains these extra business features, it's often called an eCommerce platform rather than simply a shopping cart, although many people use these terms interchangeably.

Types of shopping cart software

Some shopping cart software must be downloaded and then installed on your own web server. This often requires purchasing a license, which usually entitles you to software updates and support for a limited time (often one year).

Other downloadable shopping cart software is open-source, which means the software itself is free. However, this doesn't negate the costs of web hosting — and free, open-source shopping cart software has another serious downside. Its open-source nature means the software can be edited by an entire community of developers, so users often struggle to get knowledgeable support. To truly make the best of an open-source eCommerce platform, your business would need a developer to keep it all running smoothly.

Hosted shopping cart software is the best solution for a small business, and for any business seeking to add a shopping cart to an existing website. Hosted shopping carts are a complete package that includes web hosting with the eCommerce software already installed. With a hosted solution, you don't need to download and install anything — instead, you simply log into your control panel with your web browser. The shopping cart software provider handles software updates and other technical aspects of the platform. Instead of paying for web hosting and/or a software license, you pay a monthly or annual fee for one of the plans offered by the provider. This is referred to as the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Shopping cart software can also be differentiated by its programming language. Online shopping carts can be written in Java, JavaScript, ASP, and other languages, but an HTML shopping cart is the most versatile. HTML shopping carts are compatible with all browsers and devices, including desktop and mobile — a necessity for selling online today. Cookies are required for HTML shopping carts, but customers can be notified quickly that they need to enable cookies in order to shop on your online store. Today, eCommerce is so popular that the knowledge of cookies is commonplace, so this almost never presents an obstacle to your customers.

Read Original Article At https://www.3dcart.com/