Free Shopping Carts – Bargain or Baloney?
The shopping cart system that you choose for your business is affected by a
number of things – including price, especially if you have a tight budget.
Luckily, shopping carts come in a variety of prices, including free.
The important thing to realize about free shopping carts - or anything else that
is free for that matter - is that 'free' usually comes with a price, even if
that price isn't paid in dollars. Sometimes, the price is paid with
advertisements that may appear on your shopping cart pages. Your customers may
also pay the price for your free shopping cart, by being required to sign up for
other services. Most commonly, free shopping carts either have few features, or
require significant technical skills & time to get working.
'Free' usually comes with a price, even if
that price isn't paid in dollars
For instance, Paypal, which is quickly becoming one of the most popular payment
choices on the Internet, offers a free shopping cart for their merchants. This
shopping cart displays the Paypal logo in several places, and requires your
customers to become Paypal account holders. Although this is an easy process for
your customers, since their sign up is integrated with the ordering and payment
of your product, it is still requiring that your customer sign up for a service
that they may not want. Furthermore, Paypal will be collecting a small
percentage of each sale you make. So, it really isn't free at all, but it is a
great option for someone just starting out in ecommerce.
Another drawback to using free shopping carts is that they are usually not
nearly as full featured as paid shopping carts. Paid shopping carts will have
more features in most cases. There are some noteable exceptions to this, such as Zen Cart. With paid shopping carts, technical support is usually offered as
part of the package. Free carts tend to be support via a forum. If you
have little or no programming skills, you should either choose a paid
shopping cart where you will be able to get support if needed, or check out the forum of the free cart to see how responsive & friendly they are, particularly to less technically savvy users.
Many web hosts offer free shopping carts. This could be a problem if you want to
change web hosts at the shopping cart will not move with you. Web hosts rarely
offer tech support for the shopping carts. You should also note that many of the
free shopping cart hosts will send your customers information to a 'shared
secure server.' This might give you limited control over the design of your
payment pages.
Many merchant accounts offer free shopping carts to their customers as well.
Again, these may not be as full featured, or as fully integrated as paid
shopping carts, although, in most cases, they are already installed for you, and
quite easy to set up. As with the shopping carts that are offered with web
hosting accounts, you will lose your shopping cart if you change merchant
accounts.
Other free shopping carts will probably need programming skills to install and
configure it. If you will need to hire a programmer for this, you should
determine if you would be better off by purchasing an easier to us shopping
cart.
While a free shopping cart may be the only option you have when starting up your
business, make sure you do your homework and don't end up paying more in the long run.
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