Online eCommerce doesn’t have to be a highly expensive shopping cart system or nothing and that’s it. These days there are many forms of commercial transactions online and on phones. The basis are just allowing your customer or clients to pay you in the easiest and most hassle free manner.

List of eCommerce Solutions

SIMPLE BUY NOW BUTTONS:

These types of buttons are typically used on websites that have less than around 20 products or services on their website. Usually these buy now buttons don’t accommodate allowing people to buy more than one thing at a time. These buttons are very simple to use and implement. Paypal and Google Checkout are the leaders in creating “buy now” buttons that are easy enough to use that all you need to know is how to copy and paste.

These are great for eBooks, eCourses, and other types of simple purchases. Most of the time there are complications when connecting them to Google Analytics so you can trace from which marketing initiative your revenue is being generated from.

SIMPLE SHOPPING CARTS:

There are shopping cart solutions as simple as buy now buttons that allow you to have multiple items in the cart at once. You can use copy and paste shopping carts, sometimes referred to as eCommerce widgets. Paypal offers them and again so does Google Checkout. The nice thing about Google Check Out Widgets is that they pull their info from a simple Google Docs Spreadsheet. You just change the price in the spreadsheet and it automatically updates the widget.

The ease of use is the most important factor with these solutions. Most of the time they do not have affiliate tracking so setting up referral rewards programs are not available. The products are usually shown through an iFrame or something similar which keeps your website from gaining the SEO benefit of having those products/services listed on your site. Most of these also have trouble connecting to Google Analytics.

THIRD PARTY SHOPPING CARTS:

The most popular form of shopping cart used by small businesses is third party hosted carts. You can spot these because when you click to go to their eStore or where every you can see the url in the address bar change away from their domain. So if you start on mydomain.com and click eStore and the url changes to mydomain.ecommercecart.com you could safely assume they are using a third party.

Prices vary greatly on these kind. Most do not have affiliate tracking and making changes to fit your customers could be impossible. Some have advanced split testing that allows you to change colors, shapes and position on page of images and buttons and test which work best for your customers. Many of these are expensive. Most do not provide your site with the SEO benefit that you probably want. You run into cross domain tracking issues when trying to connect these to Google Analytics as well.

SELF HOSTED THIRD PARTY CARTS:

There are numerous free shopping carts that come in code bundles sometimes called plugins. Many are free but the good ones usually are not. You place these files on your site and connect them to a database and they usually work pretty well. Most of the time there is an admin area to upload images, write descriptions, etc. like most carts.

We recommend these types of carts as they can be altered to fit your customers, be integrated with affiliate tracking systems, integrate with split testing software and Google Analytics.

CUSTOM ADVANCED SHOPPING CARTS:

Just like anything in this world there is no limit to how awesome you can get something if you have enough money. There are plenty of shopping cart systems available that have everything a business dreams of having. Most cost a ton of money, have super high monthly fees and having further customizations done in the future will likely be very expensive.

The main problem with these systems is that business rarely improve them or abandon them when their target market gives them evidence that its not a good fit. They paid so much that they try to force it to work rather than change everything when a market tells them to.

Conclusion on eCommerce Shopping Carts

We recommend using self hosted third party carts to get the maximum benefit with the least amount of capital. Making something from scratch is just not worth it most of the time. SEO is finicky sometimes and if your expensive cart doesn’t meet Google’s algorythimn then changing courses may not be an option and the game is over. Keep you costs down. Be quick and agile. Make rapid changes based on feedback from your market through analytics, split testing, surveys, and good ol fashion customer service.