Don’t be fooled by the name. Today’s shopping carts allow customers to do far more than select and purchase items. When signing up with a web host, you will more than likely have a number of different shopping cart applications to choose from. Some of the programs you might encounter are Agora, osCommerce, CubeCart and ZenCart. To help you decide which is the right program, I’ll go over each shopping cart and detail what they have to offer.

Agora

Agora is a popular shopping cart that offers design integration for templates, HTML, Perl, JavaScript and CSS. It also includes the basic features that allow you to manage products and inventory along with the ability to create unique product pages, add unlimited options for individual products, add unlimited categories and subcategories, list best selling items and display discount codes. Agora simplifies the ordering process and management tasks as you can easily generate custom order notification messages, order forms in HTML and utilize multiple payment gateways. Granting the ability to view orders by date or status and support for numerous shipping options, Agora is the preferred shopping cart for many business owners.

osCommerce

Currently serving more than 12,000 online stores and over 150,000 website owners, osCommerce is a leading shopping cart program and an ideal choice for e-commerce. What most webmasters like about this software is that it runs flawlessly on any platform be it Windows, Linux or Apple’s Mac OS X. osCommerce is a template-based system, meaning that it can easily be integrated into your website. This structure also enables the software to be updated with ease. Similar to Agora, osCommerce offers support for unlimited products, invoices, categories and subcategories. It also makes it simple to add, remove or modify any of the shopping cart features. osCommerce allows you to create newsletters, send out invoices or packaging lists and even backup your data right from the interface. This program is very secure and supports multiple payment gateways including Authorize.Net and PayPal.

CubeCart

CubeCart is a professional shopping cart program that makes a perfect solution for e-commerce. The program is completely template-based, allowing you to generate HTML content entirely independent of the PHP it’s coded in. CubeCart is a favorite of many webmasters because of its clean interface, ease of use and minimal maintenance requirements. This software offers a number of layouts and supports unlimited products, multiple countries and languages, various shipping options and tax classes and much more. With tons of self-help resources posted on the web, you will find that CubeCart is one of the easiest shopping carts to use.

ZenCart

Catering to the new webmaster, ZenCart is a popular shopping cart application that offers the customization and ease of use needed to quickly set up an online storefront. This software requires no knowledge of HTML as products can be added, deleted or modified via a simple template-based system. ZenCart supports multiple product catalogues, pricing and payment options, numerous sorting methods, customer authorization keys and more. The WYSIWYG editors enables the easy customization of your layout, making this one of the most user-friendly shopping carts around.

The best thing about all of these shopping carts is that they can be installed in one click with the Fantastico script installer. To find out which program is right for you, I recommend learning more about the level of support they offer and what other webmasters are saying about them. In the end, it is up to you to determine which shopping cart best suits your customers.

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