Entrepreneur: Choosing An Online Shopping Cart For Your SMB E-commerce Site
Jonathan Blum looks at four shopping carts: PayPal Payflow Link, Checkout by Amazon, Google Checkout and Authorize.Net Payment Gateway.
“Ah, the siren call of striking out with your own e-commerce website. You create the better mousetrap, find the right keywords, Facebook pages and Foursquare mobile tools, and then turn it loose online. Business beats its way to your Web door, and services from companies such as MasterCard, Visa and American Express do the rest.
The reality? That’s more complex. Sure, hundreds of different tools let you customize your company’s so-called “shopping cart.” That is, the series of web pages and pop-up windows that show your customers, among other things, what they ordered, what they will pay for what they ordered, the total taxes and the shipping terms. Behind these pages is a blizzard of merchant-banking products, third-party transaction tools and other financial services that must work perfectly, and are often too confusing for most small firms.”