Shopping Cart - shopping carts come in software and hosted service based versions that allow your customers to shop for multiple items and then pass the order to your payment system by way of checkout. This service is very important if you have multiple products available on your web site. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to make sure that your shopping cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa - just ask.

Third Party Processing - There is an alternative solution to the entire puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party provider may offer all of the processing and no merchant account is required. The drawback to this approach is that you generally pay a higher overall fee per transaction and have limited ability to customize your customer's check out experience to match your website. PayPal, an eBay company, is the largest provider of this approach and is a very acceptable option.

A Few Words of Advice

Each piece of the ecommerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly set price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and set-up fees. Start with your bank, but shop this aspect around. Most small business owners should be able to set-up a fully functioning, real time processed site with a shopping cart for less that $150/mo (not including per transaction fees)

Make sure that you find out which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category you shouldn't have any problems.

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