If you run a brick and mortar business, you should consider creating an online store as well. With an online store, you can sell your products to customers around the world. Your online store is open 24 hours and 7 days a week. Your customers will find it more convenient to shop at your online store.

Since you already have an inventory, all you need to do is list your products in the online catalog. You will need an e-commerce content management system (CMS) to list your inventory on the website. The e-commerce CMS is integrated with a shopping cart.

Many years ago, the setup fee for a shopping cart was expensive. It could have cost you thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce website. Due to popular demand, many people started to offer e-commerce website setup services. To compete in the industry, the setup fee was lowered so that people with an average income could afford an e-commerce website. There are two types of shopping carts available in the market including hosted shopping cart solutions.

In a hosted shopping cart solution, you don’t have control over all the features of the store. Yahoo! shopping cart is an example of a hosted shopping cart solution. When shopping for a hosted shopping cart, make sure the company is reliable. If the company is not reliable, your site will frequently experience down times. The company must have good customer service. When you tell your problem to the customer service representative, they must help you solve it in a short amount of time.

A free shopping cart is usually included in a web hosting plan. You can check the features of the web hosting plan to see if it offers free shopping cart. Web hosting plans that offer cPanel with Fantastico are equipped with free shopping cart software. In Fantastico, you can install several shopping cart scripts such as OsCommerce, CubeCart, ZenCart, etc. The shopping cart scripts in Fantastico support multiple payment gateways such as Authorize.net, Paypal, etc.

Many retail owners prefer to buy a web hosting plan to obtain the shopping cart. The shopping cart that is included in the web hosting plan is more reliable. In addition, you have control over all the aspects of the shopping cart. Hosted shopping cart solutions like Yahoo! shopping cart are suitable for beginners who are not familiar with the technical features.

cPanel hosted shopping carts offer many benefits to customers. Customers can install their own modules. The shopping cart can be customized according to their needs. They have the ability to redesign the shopping cart in any way they want.