Selecting a best shopping cart is one of the most vital decisions you take to make your online business a huge success. Your web pages play a pivotal role in fetching you good business virtually. As you are aware, a customer is very sceptical in revealing his sensitive details online for making a purchase. Therefore, your shopping cart and the invoice thereon should be made such that it leaves no stone unturned in making your customers believe you and your products, and that yours is a reliable company.

Three well-known shopping carts available in the Internet to choose from for your website are Merchant Accounts, Hosting Shopping Carts and Fully-Integrated Shopping Carts.

In case of merchant account, as it is similar to a bank account, it allows you to process credit card payments on your site, such that you have your own payment gateway with a merchant account. With the gateway, you are assured that the transaction is taking place securely. However, as there are several other solutions being introduced in the market, merchant accounts are becoming obsolete. Nevertheless, many services offer you a merchant account along with a shopping cart and gateway at very nominal prices.

Hosted shopping carts are very popular in the sense that it serves as a simple interface to store your products, prices and shipping options. Such shopping cart is accommodated by a third-party web-host which generates HTML coding for purchase buttons, pricing, quantity, and so on. At times, these shopping carts do give a problem when the clients are transferred to a different web location to enter their credit card secure information. However, the new page or location can be customised, if required, to give the customers a similar look as that of your own website, to keep your customers on it.

As far as fully-integrated shopping carts are concerned, they offer dynamism in their features, not otherwise available in the above two accounts, such as customer reviews, discounts, etc.

So we see that when a shopping cart has been chosen for your eCommerce site perfectly, it can do wonders to your online business. Not only would you maintain a prestigious customer base online, but also expand your business on an extensive scale.