Setting Up an E-Commerce Shopping Cart Properly

Selling products or services online is a simple process and there are many options. However when thinking of adding a shopping cart to your site it is important that you get the basics right.

There are a number of free shopping carts available that can easily be installed via fantastico or softalicious which can be found in your cpanel. OS commerce, cubecart, roman cart and magento cart are the most common.

With os commerce the basic install is free and there are a load of add-ons free and paid as well as templates to change the shape and look of the site available to really make your e-commerce website stand out.

Most of them can be setup relatviely easily and look pretty good out of the box.

The thing to remember though, is if you want to sell online then your site has to look professional. You are trying to get people to part with their money and if your site is poorly designed, with spelling mistakes and poor content then you will not look credible and you will not make sales.

When I first started out I tried all of the free options to see which suited me best and I ended up using oscommerce. The website, www.glasstablesandchairs.com has, of course evolved over the years and still sits high on the first page of the search engines for a lot of highly competitive keywords. The back end of this site still uses oscommerce although the front page has been totally re-designed.

After setting up a number of e-commerce sites I now use interspire shopping cart. You can either pay for a hosted version or download and install onto your own servers.

I use the self hosted version personally but the hosted version is so easy and very fast to setup and get going.

The one thing about the interspire shopping cart is that it looks great right out of the box. It is easy to edit just drag and drop. Here is one of the latest ones that I helped to setup. www.loveyourwater.co.uk. This website was set up and running in a week-end.

The basic version is $395 and the ultimate is $1795. Not cheap but well worth every penny if you are serious about running an online business selling products or a variety of services.

The cost of interspire works out to be a lot less than it has cost to update and customise the glass tables website.

They have a free trial so you can test it out for yourself and I really recommend that you do. Check out the link below.

This is an affiliate link, so if you buy via this link I will receive a commission. You can go right to the site directly if your choose. You will pay the same amount but they will keep it all 🙂

If you DO buy through my link, I will be happy to help you set it up and answer any questions or queries you have via skype, phone or email. See, I am happy to work for my money :-)))))