How to choose a shopping cart.

[belahost]

There is a big choice of shopping carts all over the internet and sometimes it's rather difficult to choose the one.
In this article we will guide you how to choose a shopping cart.
One of the main features of any shopping cart is user-friendly interface for the shoppers. They should not guess how they can add products to the cart and purchase them.
People do not like filling the forms. Your shopping cart should not require the shoppers to be registered.
The other important thing is the shoppers should like the design of your shopping cart. It will be a big plus if the shopping cart is based on templates.
If you follow the simple rules above you can increase your sales.

Free shopping carts. Some people like free shopping carts others don't. Some developers of free shopping carts pay less attention to the security.
As a result a free shopping cart can have security problems.

The most popular free shopping carts are:
osCommerce www.oscommerce.com
Zen Cart www.zen-cart.com
Those shopping carts are rather powerful but from the other hand sometimes it's difficult to set them up.

Commercial shopping carts. They are more professional as a rule. The developers are more interested in developing them.
One of the commercial shopping carts is 1st ProCommerce (www.1procommerce.com). You can sell digital downloads and merchandise using this shopping cart.

More expencive commercial shopping carts are Cart32 (www.cart32.com) and ProStores (www.prostores.com).

P.S. This is my own opinion. If you have any suggestions you can post them here.

[bj]

I've found CubeCart to be adequate for most people, and from a user's point of view it's much easier to learn to use than zencart or osc. It's also xhtml/css compliant, and I've found it easy to template (actually, though slightly more difficult, Zen isn't bad in that area either.) Cubecart's not quite as full featured as the other two. One problem with it is that mods to add functionality are core mods, which is a pain at upgrade time.

Another I've worked with is Virtuemart, which is the ecommerce component for Joomla. There's a lot to be said for it being hooked to the CMS, but it's a challenge to template successfully. I've also found that a lot of the extensions for Joomla break the Virtuemart Cart. I hope they fix this with the new version for the newer Joomla, since the newer Joomla is easier to template.

[dave]

Also it is very hard to find one that is search engine friendly. Here are the list of few shopping carts with brief details that you may wish to an overview;
http://www.chronopay.com/en/about/pa...shopping_carts

[unitecheddie]

All our e-commerce software comes with integrated shopping cart. You can download the software free at www.unitechnology.co.uk

UniTrader comes with plug ins to WordPay, PayPal, Secpay, PROTX.