Either way you've gone shopping and when you put that bag of rich, fresh and aromatic French Roast whole-bean coffee in your empty shopping cart, you've put a physical object into another before moving down bakery isle to fresh dark-chocolate coated Biscotti and put another physical object into a cart.

Online, both of your products are simply bits and bytes and shopping cart is complex software hosted on a remote web server somewhere off in cyberspace. So whether you'll be buying that shopping cart software and having it installed on your own web server or simply using an existing cart hosted on some other secure server, you will be using shopping cart software to sell your products or services online.

Hence, need for small business owners everywhere to know about shopping cart software and reason Dr. Wilson wrote ebook. I was excited to read definitive work, just released by Wilson this year as I was about to recommend purchase of shopping cart software to a client, then install it for him. I had my opinions of what was available and was prepared to make some recommendations based on past experience.

Then I saw "The Shopping Cart Report" and, knowing that things change at-internet-speed online, I thought I'd review NEW recommendations of others before committing my client to any one software or hosted service. Both my client and I are very glad that I made that choice!

It's certainly not scintillating reading, in fact, far from that, as you trudge through reviews of software entirely inappropriate to your needs, services unlikely to make sense to non-geeks and interviews with a shopping cart software company president that will leave you wondering why it helps you to hear from her. All of it leaves you kind of lost and bewildered, especially if you know little of CGI scripts and secure server certificates.

So why read ebook? Because if you DO know basics of shopping cart software, payment gateways and online merchant accounts, ebook is a revelation! That revelation for me came while I sat scowling and scratching my forhead in confusion wondering, "When ya gonna get to one that's right for my client?" I was reading about Miva Merchant, a well respected software based on a database language that comes with open- source code, allowing customization and tweaking to your needs.

That revelation was simply this: No single shopping cart soft- ware is a one-size-fits-all solution. There are carts ranging from FREE to hundreds of thousands of dollars and they are all designed for very specific purposes, none of those purposes are likely to fit your needs precisely and none of them could or ever will. Shopping for a shopping cart is going to take you time, research, patience, more research and more time. Give in to that unhappy requirement and put in time and energy.

The most helpful distributors will buy products from you, then warehouse, distribute, and sell them to customers. They'll also handle customer service. (Note: These folks are not always called distributors. In Japan, they're known as wholesalers.)

Networking among trusted business colleagues is best way to find a reputable distributor. If you don't have many overseas contacts, take heart. The U.S. government offers an alphabet soup of programs that are designed to help small business with this -- and many of them actually work. The U.S. Department of Commerce (http://www.doc.gov/) offers a wealth of resources through U.S. Export Assistant Center, International Trade Administration (http://www.ita.doc.gov/), and U.S. Commercial Services (http://www.usatrade.gov/).