ECommerce: Choosing an Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Choosing an Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Written by Danna Henderson

Choosing an online shopping cart is a big decision. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar business, your website is your only chance to impress potential customers. It needs to project a professional image to capture repparttar

trust of your visitors. The shopping cart is a particularly important part of your website because it deals with people’s personal information and credit card numbers. People are nervous about online purchases and need to be assured that they are giving their credit card numbers to a reputable company.

There are several types of ecommerce shopping carts available. They range from merchant services, which require no programming skills, to fully integrated shopping carts that require custom programming. The three main categories of shopping carts are:

Merchant services such as eBay and 2Checkout

Hosted shopping cart services

Fully integrated shopping carts

Merchant Services

Most shopping carts require you to have your own merchant account and gateway. A merchant account is a bank account that allows a business to conduct credit card transactions and repparttar 108564 gateway allows repparttar 108565 transaction to be conducted over a secure connection. It’s okay if you don’t have a merchant account or gateway. Merchant service shopping carts allow you to use their merchant account, gateway and shopping cart for a higher cost.

Merchant services are beneficial for very small businesses or those that are just starting and don’t have a lot of orders. Merchant services provide repparttar 108566 merchant account, gateway, hosted shopping cart and will maintain your customer’s personal information. They usually require a set-up fee between 50 and 200 dollars, transaction fee between 30 and 75 cents, and 5% to 10% of each transaction. Because you are using their merchant account, your customer’s credit card statement will show repparttar 108567 merchant services business name not yours. In some cases, customers will not recognize repparttar 108568 charge and may dispute it.

Merchant service shopping carts have an administrative interface, which allows you to login to your account to add products, prices and shipping options. The shopping cart generates repparttar 108569 html for repparttar 108570 purchase buttons and you simply copy and paste repparttar 108571 html into your web pages. When your customer clicks on repparttar 108572 purchase button, he is taken to another website to enter repparttar 108573 credit card information. This indicates to repparttar 108574 customer that you are a small business. Some potential customers will abandon repparttar 108575 shopping cart rather than enter their credit card information on a website they know nothing about.

Once your business grows to repparttar 108576 point where you are processing over $1000 a month, it’s more cost effective to apply for your own merchant account and switch to either a hosted shopping cart (little or no programming) or a fully integrated shopping cart (programming required).

Hosted Shopping Cart

The hosted shopping cart is a great solution for a small business that is processing over $1000 a month but does not have repparttar 108577 resources to create or customize a fully integrated shopping cart. Hosted shopping carts are similar to repparttar 108578 merchant services because they provide an administrative interface for you to enter products, pricing and shipping options. They will generate repparttar 108579 html for repparttar 108580 purchase buttons, which can be copied and pasted into your html pages.

“7 Incredibly Simple Ways To Profit Wildly From Public Domain Material”

Written by Ewen Chia

Copyright 2005 Ewen Chia

If you’re in repparttar business of marketing online, a major portion of your income will come from your ability to deliver quality content and products to your market. Now, besides creating these yourself, one of repparttar 108563 quickest and cheapest way to acquire all repparttar 108564 content and products you need is in repparttar 108565 public domain. Whatever your requirements, you can find almost anything in repparttar 108566 public domain. Examples include texts, audio, images, stock video, music and software...which you can flexibly use in whichever ways you want! A word of warning though... While a large portion of this material is "fair use", not all repparttar 108567 works entered into repparttar 108568 public domain database are clear of copyright restrictions. A true public domain work is information open to repparttar 108569 public for use, including copying, distributing and modification at no cost. Currently works published 75 years ago are considered to be public domain, while those published from 1924-1963 may be public domain - IF repparttar 108570 copyright was not renewed. I would highly recommend reading repparttar 108571 public domain FAQ pages at these websites first before you use any material: http://www.gutenberg.org http://www.pdimages.com http://www.pdmusic.org http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books However - if you desire an easier and quicker method of monetizing repparttar 108572 public domain, you will be amazed at what you can do at ==> http://www.miniebook.com/files.htm Assuming you now have all repparttar 108573 public domain content you want, repparttar 108574 million dollar question is: "How do I truly monetize them to create long-term profit streams?" The answer is in these 7 simple methods: Method #1: Kick Start An Information Empire How many mini sites in a week can you set up to sell info-products that has already been created for you? It's a no-brainer. Public domain provides repparttar 108575 perfect opportunity for creating an empire of super profitable mini sites that can each make money on autopilot for you. It's really a numbers game... If one mini site generates a conservative $300 per month, ten of these would mean a nice income of $3,000 every month! What if you just concentrate on getting repparttar 108576 formula down to a science and duplicate these mini sales machines every day? Think about it. Apply this concept to auction listings and you can also create a fortune with public domain and eBay. Method #2: Churn Out Complete Niche Websites Split up public domain material and use them as pages of targeted niche content for your website. It's a simple idea but hardly anyone exploit it. All you do is select relevant public domain books and break them down into instant content. With a little SEO skills, planning and targeted keyword-based public domain content, you can spit out new websites that ranks highly in repparttar 108577 search engines overnight. This is a better solution and enhancement to automated site creation tools, which being essentially carbon copies of each other, have high risks of being banned. While it takes work, this is one quick way to develop new niche sites on demand. You can then profit from them using Google Adsense, affiliate programs and advertising revenues. This method can also be applied to blogs.

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