When you sell products and services online, it is necessary to have a shopping cart. A shopping cart is what allows customers to select more than one item, so that they can pay for multiple things at once, with only one payment to be made. This is a matter of convenience for online shoppers, and can make your ecommerce Web site more appealing to consumers. One of the easiest ways to add a shopping cart to your Web site is to use a PayPal shopping cart.

PayPal ecommerce shopping cart

If you have a PayPal account, your shopping cart is free. This is very useful, since it allows you to have a cart that accepts PayPal as a payment. PayPal is becoming increasing popular as online shoppers discover that they do not want to have to give our personal payment information for every transaction. PayPal helps provide safety and security. In addition to accepting PayPal payments, the shopping card also provides a way for you to accept credit cards and other forms of electronic payment.

The PayPal shopping cart is compatible with most Web sites, and fairly easy to install. You will not have to do any CGI scripting to make it work, and you should be able to use the PayPal shopping cart whether you are being hosted on a Windows platform or a Linux platform. There are also customization options that allows you to add buttons and features to the basic cart. PayPal offers a good technical manual that offers you instructions on adding different buttons and customization. There are even examples so that you can get an idea of what is possible with your PayPal shopping cart.

It is important to note, however, that the PayPal shopping cart is rather basic. It does not have all of the same features and fancy doo-dads that some of the other, costlier shopping carts have. While the PayPal cart is ideal for most simple transactions, and it provides your customers with flexibility, if you want something more advanced you may have to be willing to pay. However, even with the basic features you can do the following with the PayPal shopping cart:

• Add shipping and taxes
• Use a donation feature
• Dynamic buttons
• Pass customer information to PayPal for better operation.

PayPal does not charge fees for use of the shopping cart; your fee schedule will remain the same. This is important, since PayPal fees are relatively low. The fact that you will not have to pay extra fees for your shopping cart can help you keep more of your money and better attend to the bottom line.

In the end, you have to consider your own personal preferences. You need to decide what sort of shopping cart will work best for you, and whether a free shopping cart will be enough. For most small to medium sized businesses, a free shopping cart like the PayPal shopping cart is more than sufficient. Besides, the PayPal shopping cart includes the advantage of allowing you to accept PayPal for payment.