Shopping Carts

E-commerce business owners need a shopping cart that works seamlessly with your payment gateway so you can process online credit card payments. With a PCI-compliant payment gateway, Instabill can integrate with virtually every open source (free) shopping cart. If need be, our IT staff can build a custom cart based on your needs.

How can a merchant best choose which shopping cart is the right fit? Here is a 6-step guide from the Instabill IT team.

1. Know Your Website Hosting Provider

Most online shopping carts need a web server that runs PHP/MySQL. Instabill provides modules for many shopping cart solutions that require PHP/MySQL, but you may come across open source e-commerce cart applications that use ASP or other programming languages. If you are unsure what hosting scheme your website provider supports, contact them to find out.

2. Speak With Your Web Developer

The person or company who builds and maintains your website will likely be the person setting up your e-commerce shopping cart and matching it with your site. Instabill will gladly help you connect your online cart with our payment gateway. The process, however, may be easier if you choose a cart your with which your web developer is familiar.

3. What Are Your E-Commerce Business Needs?

Shopping carts are not one-size-fits-all. Many provide specific features such as calculating shipping fees by volume, or one that uses USPS as a shipping option. Prioritize your business’ needs before you choose.

4. How Instabill Can Help You Choose

Different payment service providers offer different levels of support for carts. For easy integration, Instabill offers modules for the following carts:

• OsCommerce: The osCommerce shopping cart is an open source solution for online stores. Feature include PHP and MySQL compatibility, multilingual with default English, German, and Spanish built in, supports unlimited products and categories, supports multiple currency processing, provides temporary shopping carts for guests as well as permanent shopping carts for registered customers, and supports USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
• Xcart: Thousands of merchants worldwide use the X-Cart shopping cart to accept credit cards online not only because it is free, but it is easy to use. Features include wholesale pricing and discounts, inventory tracking, PCI compliant, SEO-friendly product catalog, supports USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL/Aurborne, CanadaPost, and AustraliaPost, and supports electronic goods and downloadable products.
• Magento: Created by Varien, the community edition of the Magento shopping cart is free. Some of the main features of this cart include coupon and promotional pricing support, SEO-friendly, abandoned shopping cart reports, batch import and export of catalogs, allows for multiple images per product, one-page checkout, multilingual and multi-currency support, and free shipping.
• Prestashop: Another free, open source solution, more than 100,000 stores worldwide use PrestaShop as their online shopping cart. Features include downloadable products support, manage the number of products per page, supports multiple images per product, supports zooming in on images, provides wish lists to customers, offers one-page checkout, customers can include gift messages, and supports USPS, UPS, FedEx, and CanadaPost.
• Zencart: The user-friendly Zen Cart is a free and open source shopping cart software. Some features include easy product management, works with both PHP and MySQL, supports sale items, allows for multiple images and popups for larger images, supports CVV2 card verifications, free delivery support, SEO-friendly, and multilingual and multi-currency support.

Below are some of the more popular shopping carts that Instabill merchant partners use: