Review: Compare eCommerce and Shopping Cart options

When adding shopping carts and other e-commerce services to your site, you can choose from many options. Familiar brands, such as PayPal and Google, have made major efforts to migrate their online commerce technology to the mobile platform.

And a crop of new companies are emerging, with dedicated mobile services that include everything from m-commerce to short messaging service (SMS, also known as text-messaging), mobile coupons, and other mobile features.

At the low end, you can get a simple shopping cart set up quickly and for no upfront costs with Google Checkout or Paypal. At the high end, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a program like Magento fully integrated with your store's inventory and other systems.

Four main flavors of mobile commerce solutions

When it comes to ecommerce on the Web, you have a wide range of options. Here's a quick overview of the top three approaches:

1. Selling hundreds or thousands of things online

If you need a more sophisticated Web-based shopping cart, you'll again find a range of options, including custom shopping systems that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and deploy, and a wide range of online shopping services.

At the high end, the commerce service, Magento, provides all the tools you need to create a shopping site as complex as Amazon. But buyer beware -- implementing a ecommerce system as complicated as Magento requires professional programming experience, or many thousands of dollars in development costs.

2. Selling just a few things (with little investment) with Google and PayPal

At the low end, you can create a simple checkout button with Google's new merchant checkout service. Learn how to set up a Google Checkout Shopping cart with Dreamweaver in this tutorial.

3. A Popular Small Business Choice:
The Yahoo! Shopping Service

If you want an online service that can handle large sales volume without as much customization as a dedicated shopping cart, consider setting up an online store at Yahoo! They offer small business services, and handle to some of the largest shopping sites online.

Quick Comparison: Google vs. PayPal

Google and PayPal both offer one-click Buy buttons that make it easy to sell one product or service on any Web site or blog by simply copying a little code into your page. This is more than enough to take care of many simple tasks, such as charging a membership fee or subscription, or selling a custom print or e-book.

• Pros: You can complete this task in a few minutes and there are no upfront costs. Plus, everything you need is in one package, so you don’t have to worry about setting up credit card processing or other transaction services.
• Cons: You can sell only one item at a time, there are no shopping cart features, and you have few options about the way this button looks on your site.
• Learn more about the differences between PayPal and Google.
  

Creating a Simple Shopping Cart

If you sell more than one thing, you'll definitely want a shopping cart. You do want your customers to buy more than one item, right?

Graduating to a simple simple shopping carts in an all-in-one package from Google and Paypal is a great next step, and both services provide a payment service so even at the low end, and with no upfront fees, you can add a real shopping cart that's perfect for a few or even quite a few times.

• Pros: You can complete this task in an afternoon and there are no upfront costs -- you pay only when a purchase goes through a requires credit card processing and Google and Paypal with both transfer payments directly to your bank after keeping a small percentage for the transaction fees.
• Cons: Although these shopping carts make it possible to sell more than one item, you have few options about the way this button looks on your site, and limited options for saving product descriptions.

Get started now with Paypal or Google Checkout

• Create a PayPal Button: Add a Simple Buy Now Button with Paypal -- you can learn the basics in a fw minutes with this tutorial.
• Set up a Google Checkout Cart: If you want to see if Google Checkout might be right for you, read these instructions to set up a Google Checkout shopping cart and you'll see how it works as you learn how to do it yourself.
• Compare: PayPal vs. Google vs. Amazon: Read a detailed comparison of these easy-to-use online shopping services.

High-end shopping carts

Dedicated shopping carts provide the greatest options for customization as well as tracking and other CRM features, but they are much more complex to set up and they require a separate transaction service to handle payment processing.

For this part of the process you can use the transaction services provided by Google or PayPal. You may also be able to handle transaction processing with your own bank if it offers these kinds of merchant services, or through any online or brick and mortar bank you want to work with, but if you choose to set it up yourself, prepare to manage all of the complexisites, including security.

High-end shopping cart services can be complex to install and set up, but if you sell a lot of items, or need your online system to be integrated with your brick-and-mortar inventory system, it may be worth the cost. If you let Google or Paypal handle the transaction, they do it over an SSL protected connection for you. If you prefer to do it yourself with your bank, you may need to set up SSL on your own server.

• Pros: You can better control how your merchandise is displayed, manage more products more easily, and even integrate online and offline inventory management. Some shopping cart services offer added features to help manage customers, product discounts, coupons, and so on.
• Cons: Using a shopping cart service requires considerable work to set up the software on your server and integrate it with your Web site. These services are also more expensive and generally only worth the added cost and effort if you sell at least a dozen products.

Mobile shopping carts: A growing list of shopping carts and m-commerce services are designed specifically to work on the mobile Web. Some of the newest m-commerce companies are set up to do all the work for you; others offer shopping carts you can design or customize and build into your site yourself.

• Pros: Designed from the start for the mobile platform, you can expect companies such as asknet (www.asknet.com) and mPoria (www.mporia.com) to provide solid support for mobile devices and understand the unique challenges of the mobile Web.
  
• Cons: This is an exciting area of the mobile Web, but like any new technology, you won’t find much history behind some of these companies, so it can be harder to compare customer reviews or find third-party help or tech support.

A completely custom-built cart with your own back end: This is for the intrepid mobile Web designer only. If you want complete control over the look and functionality of your m-commerce site, as well as control over how the checkout and money-transfer process is handled, you can build your own integrated solution from the ground up. Most likely, you would need a team of experts to handle all the complex issues involved in such an undertaking.

• Pros: You have total control over the look and feel of the shopping cart. If something goes wrong, you can take matters into your own hands to fix it, rather than relying on someone else’s customer service to pick up the phone or respond to e-mails. All the data about your customers and what they buy is under your control.
  
• Cons: You have to take care of every little nitpicky detail. If you miss something, only you can fix it. And if you’re away and the site goes down while you’re on vacation, you're out of business (at least until you can access your site again). You will need to have your own mechanism for transferring the funds, and maintain your own secure database for your customer’s financial data.
  
  Mobile commerce is evolving so rapidly that the companies listed here may well have added new features by the time you read this. Visit www.MobileWebDesignBlog.com for updates to the providers and services featured in this chapter and elsewhere in the book.

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