When you create your online store, one of the things you will most likely want to incorporate into your site is a shopping cart. However, it can be difficult to find the one cart out of all the shopping cart solutions that works best for you. There are a couple of ways you can solve this dilemma, however.

The first is to read up on online shopping cart solutions and learn how to do it yourself. You can find some free code and java scripts available on the web, and some web hosts even have their own shopping carts available for you to plug into your website. If you have a bit of HTML know-how, it won’t be too difficult to add a shopping cart.

On the other hand, if you’d rather not take the business risk of setting up a shopping cart system yourself (and since the system will handle your customer’s credit card number, you do want to be sure it’s working correctly), you can pay the extra and go with one of the more complete “idiot proof” systems. You might need to play with it and you’ll still need to integrate it into the payment gateway, but its still another viable option. I’m not crazy about the idea of hiring someone to do it for you and I explain why in “Start Up Mistakes“