E-Commerce: Step 1 - Choose which Shopping Cart Software to use

If you would like to create an E-commerce website and sell products online, the first thing you'll need to do is choose which software you would like to use. Three widely used online shopping cart applications are:

• - OS Commerce
• - Zen Cart
• - CubeCart
• - OpenCart

Each program can easily be installed within Fantastico with just a few clicks. While we don't officially recommend one program over the other, we've gathered some basic information below to help you in your decision:

osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 239,200 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis. You can find more information about OsCommerce by visiting osCommerce

Zen Cart is a shopping cart that tries to put the merchants and shoppers requirements first. Zen Cart is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently. To learn more about Zen Cart, please visit Zen Cart

CubeCart is an "out of the box" ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world. You can find more information for Cube Cart at Cube Cart

The Premium Website Builder includes an online shopping cart, called eShop. eShop has distinct advantages and disadvantages when compared with OsCommerce, Zen Cart, and Cube Cart. While programs such as Os Commerce include many features and ways to tweak your online store to exactly how you need it, there is more of a learning curve to using those softwares due to the increase of features. eShop is quite easy to setup and get started using, however it does not offer all of the same bells and whistles as does OsCommerce or Zen Cart.