Free Shopping Cart

With all the free shopping carts in the market, the question has to be asked if any of them are worth it or should you go with a pay shopping cart. This is not a simple question to answer and there is no one answer for every situation. Each situation should be taken into consideration when deciding what ecommerce products to use. We hope to show the pros and cons of the free shopping cart programs so you can decide for yourself if a free cart is right for you.

The word FREE is used a lot in todays society. Back in the 1970's a marketing specialist said FREE was one of the secret words for selling things. In today's day and age this is true in some instances, while in others if something is free you may just think it is not as good of a product as the other one which costs a little more. This can be true in the case of free shopping carts also.

The answer to this question lies in the different types of free shopping carts available. The main types of free shopping carts are, open source shopping carts, offline processing shopping carts, and bundled shopping carts, and limited processing free shopping carts.
open source shopping cart
Open source refers to a free software product. It actually refers to more than that, but for our purposes we will say it means the software is free to use. The free shopping carts which are open source provide you with software to install on your server to run the shopping cart program. For novices this probably isn't a very good idea since you will be dealing with a lot of security issues. This isn't really a good idea for experienced users either since you will be required to be handling credit card data. Visa is starting to enforce restrictions on any company who handles credit card information. It is still to be seen how this will affect open source free shopping carts.
offline processing shopping cart
Another type of free shopping cart is the offline processing shopping cart. This cart is hosted on the shopping cart providers server and they take care of taking the credit card information, and then they send this information to you. You then need to process this order manually through a virtual terminal such as provided by ProPay. This shopping cart would work well with the small business merchant account information discussed elsewhere. This combination will work okay for those who do not take a lot of orders and each one can be done manually.
bundled shopping cart
Many of the providers of the other pieces in the ecommerce puzzle will offer a cart bundled in with the merchant account or payment gateway and tell you it is a free shopping cart. Most likely this is not a free shopping cart, they have just increased their prices other places to make up the difference in giving you a free shopping cart. One of the main places they increase the price is the monthly minimum. Of course if you process enough that the monthly minimum does not apply to you, then the shopping cart would actually be completely free since you don't pay anything from the montly minimum.
limted processing free shopping cart
What the limited processing free shopping cart providers do is give you a watered down version of their shopping cart for free. This could mean you can only process a certain number of online orders a month, or maybe you can only have a very limited number of products. The ways in which these providers can limit you are endless. Now, with everything else if these limits fit in with what you need for your shopping cart, then use one of these limited processing free shopping carts. For instance, if you are only selling one product and can find a company which offers the full shopping cart but limits you to 10 products for the free shopping cart version, then this would be a great deal for you.

Again this is a personal question only you can answer, but if the situation fits for you then possibly the free shopping cart will be the best program for you. With the competition in the shopping cart market you can get a descent shopping cart for around $10 a month with little or nor setup fee. This does not seem to unreasonable to me. You can always start with a free shopping cart and see if it fits your needs. Once it doesn't fit your needs anymore and you will need to get a shopping cart which can handle your orders automatically.

Below is a list of some of the free shopping cart providers in the market today. We have divided them into three categories, open souce shopping carts, and offline processing carts, and Limited processing free shopping carts. Check them out and find the free shopping cart which best meets your needs.

Offline Processing Free Shopping Carts

Mals Ecommerce - Offline processing only with the free shopping cart, but you can upgrade when needed to do online processing.

Open Source Free Shopping Carts

Agora Cart

OS Commerce

CartIt

Limited Processing Free Shopping Carts

eMartCart - They have a lite version which limits you to 45 items and only 4 options per products and some other things as well.

PayPal - PayPal gets put into this category because they offer an okay free shopping cart but it is lacking in features and can be upgraded.