MaximumEcommerce.com

Doing Research on what ecommerce solution to use? Let’s assume that you have a pretty good idea what products you want to sell and are ready and excited to build a e-commerce site for it. If so, congratulations! Most people never take action and end up dreaming and never doing. You are way ahead of those day-dreamers. Give yourself a pat on the back! And if you have done your homework and have a pretty good educated guess about the demand of your products, you are ready to select a shopping cart system!

Now, the type of e-commerce system you will choose will depend on your knowledge and experience in building websites.

For the beginner: If you have not built an ecommerce store online before, you are best off choosing an easy to setup, all-in-one type of shopping cart service for a reasonable monthly fee for the following reasons.

* Step by step setup which requires no prior experience

* Includes everything from domain name acquisition, hosting, shopping cart service and even payment processing, and everything will work seamlessly without a glitch.

* Customizable look and feel of site even if you just use the easy-to-use site building tools. If you want really advanced designs, there are always designers that can create a “skin” to work with your shopping cart site.

* Manageable monthly fee and sometimes a small percentage of sales.

For the more advanced webmasters: You may want to build a shopping cart using either a free, open source software and customize it yourself, or you can purchase a ready-to-run software that are usually more stable than the free versions. Here are somethings you might expect if you want to go with this method.

* No monthly fees on the shopping cart since it’s a one time fee to purchase the software (or free if you use one of the open source softwares). You’ll need to get your own domain name, hosting, payment processor, SSL, and so on.

* Flexibility when it comes to customization. Since these are softwares, chances are, there are modules you can purchase to achieve certain unique functions not found in the standard versions. Or if your request is too weird/rare, you can always find a programmer who specializes in customizing a particular shopping cart software and they can pretty much do anything you want do it.

The choice is really up to you - If you have read this far, I suspect you are a beginner who is thinking about starting your own ecommerce store. If so, the subscription based, all-in-one ecommerce services are the way to go. As a start up company, you have enough things to worry about than to mess with trial and error, and for a reasonable monthly fee, everything is provided for you and seamlessly tied together for you. Some of the best subscription-based all-in-one ecommerce solutions I know of are YahooStores by Yahoo (you must have a Yahoo email account to access) and Prostores which is eBay’s answer to the all-in-one ecommerce solution. With either one you can be up and running with your first e-commerce store in a matter of hours! I personally started with YahooStores a few years ago when I first got started.

For you hardcore webmasters out there who don’t mind a little work and testing to get the most customizable shopping/ecommerce site, I recommend using X-cart as I am very familiar with it and it is also very SEO friendly if you purchase the SEO module available separately. There are a ton of easy-to-install aftermarket modules available even if you don’t want to modify the software yourself.

So there you have it. The two basic choices for starting your ecommerce business. Whichever you choose, the important thing is to take action, and do something while you are inspired! Remember, losers daydream and never take real actions. Winners have real dreams which they act upon, and they continue to refine their methods until they succeed. Be a winner!