Sell online: add a shopping cart to your Web site!
How to sell products and services on the Internet
Selling products and services over the Internet is not difficult, and can be extremely rewarding. You might be wondering what exactly is needed to sell products on the Internet. Here is some information on how to get started.
- What you will need to sell online
- Buying a shopping cart vs. a service
- Which shopping cart should you buy?
- Next steps
What you will need to sell online
You're ready to start selling your products over the Internet, but what's really needed? Here is a quick look:
- You will need a Web site... and you probably already have one. If not, ask one of our partners to build you a turnkey ecommerce Web site. These are expert Web designers, who are also very familiar with our shopping carts.
- You will have to purchase a shopping cart and integrated it with your Web site. If you want to know more about what a shopping cart is and what it does, we wrote an ecommerce tutorial just for you. Here at Early Impact we focus on developing top-quality shopping cart software for businesses.
- You will need to integrate the shopping cart with your Web site. Some shopping carts are easier to merge with the rest of your Web site than others.
- You will need a way to collect payments. A sophisticated shopping cart like ProductCart provides you with many ways to collect payment: real-time credit card processing through a number of supported payment gateways, offline credit card processing (e.g. you can use your POS if you have a retail store), check, purchase order, PayPal, etc.
- If you decide to process credit cards in real time you will need:
- A business bank account
- A credit card merchant account. Your bank or the gateway that you sign up with will help you get a merchant account. The exceptions are PayPal (Express Checkout, Website Payments Pro, and PayPal Standard) and Google Checkout, for which you don't need a merchant account.
- An account with a payment gateway. Some credit card processors also act as a payment gateway, in which case you would not be required to take this further step. ProductCart supports many leading payment gateways.
- A secure certificate (SSL). You should have one even if you do not take payments. Customers want to be on a secure page even if they are simply setting up an account. Get a dedicated, inexpensive SSL certificate
Buying a shopping cart vs. a service
There are companies that will offer you some or all of the services mentioned above as part of one package. Although this may sound good at first, the cost of running a store is typically much higher in that scenario, and you are a lot less flexible in what you can do with your Web shop. The advantages of using a shopping cart like ProductCart, rather than a pre-packaged ecommerce service such as Yahoo! Stores are many. Among them:
- No monthly fees
- No percentage of sales taken away from you
- Unlimited products, categories, customers, etc.
- Total control on the storefront look & feel
- Total control on the shopping cart functionality. You own the software. If you need new features, you can hire somebody to add them just for you.
- Total control on where you Web store is hosted. If you don't like the service provide by the Web hosting company, you can move to another one and bring your store with you.
More information on the licensed vs. hosted shopping cart debate >>
Which shopping cart should you buy?
All right. Let's say you like the idea of buying a shopping cart to run your Internet store. Here are the top reasons for choosing ProductCart.
Yes, there are a lot of other shopping carts out there. Which one should you choose? Which one will work best for you? Reviewing and comparing different software can be very time consuming. To help you, we have put together some tips on comparing shopping carts.
Next steps
- Learn more about our shopping cart software and the hundreds of features that it offers. Using a top quality ecommerce system like ProductCart is the first step to running a successful online store.
- View a partial list of ecommerce stores that use our software. That will give you an idea of how other companies are using ProductCart. You will notice that the software blends seamlessly with any Web site design.
- Ready to go? Then buy ProductCart today and be up and running in no time.
- Are you thinking of having somebody build the store for you? We provide complete ecommerce solutions through a network of Web design companies that are ready to help you. You focus on running your company, and they build a powerful ecommerce store for you.
- View other ecommerce tutorials.
