Free Shopping Carts For E-Commerce Websites

If you have a product to sell, you can use the awesome power of the web to increase your sales and profitability. In order to do that, you will need to have an e-commerce website and an e-commerce web hosting solution.

E-Commerce Web Hosting

With an e-commerce web hosting package, you can have access to everything that you need to set up your virtual store in days. Most e-commerce hosting plans available nowadays include:

• Free domain name and setting up of your domain.
• Secure order forms
• Access to payment gateways and secure credit card processing
• Help with opt-in marketing

Another very important inclusion in your e-commerce web hosting plan is that of shopping carts. Much like you need physical shopping carts when you go shopping in a supermarket, you need virtual shopping carts to make shopping easy and convenient on your website. While you can have a web developer create a unique shopping cart solution for your site, or buy software for the same; both these options can be quite expensive. Thus, one way of doing away with this expense is to ensure that your e-commerce web hosting company provides you with a quality shopping cart system for your site.

Free E-Commerce Shopping Carts

There are various open source and free-to-use shopping cart solutions available nowadays. The more popular ones are:

1. OS Commerce: This is one of the most widely used open source e-commerce shopping cart available to site owners. With its wide range of unique features, you can set up and have your e-commerce website running quickly and easily.

Not only is it extremely easy to set-up and manage the OS Commerce shopping cart system, but you can also customize your virtual store with your unique shopping requirements and offer your visitors a quality shopping experience. Whether you have just a handful of products to offer or thousands, OS Commerce shopping carts are perfect for your e-commerce website.

2. ZenCart: Although originally based on the OS Commerce shopping cart, ZenCart has now developed its own identity and user following. The main feature that makes ZenCart popular is that it offers a Spotlight feature to shine the spotlight on particular products in addition to having the regular category lists of products.

ZenCart also supports many different types of payment gateways so your site visitors should not have any trouble making payments on your virtual store.

Other open source and free-to-use e-commerce shopping carts include CubeCart, Agora, phpShop, myMarket etc.

Whichever shopping cart you select for your e-commerce website, make sure that it is properly integrated with different payment gateways and that your shopping cart allows credit card payments to be made.

If you need a web host for your ecommerce store, I highly recommend InMotion Hosting for their Business Class Hosting packages. They use business class hardware and have a limited number of users per server to ensure performance and reliability. Click here to view their hosting packages.