Free Shopping Cart

5 of the best 'easy to use' free shopping carts

Installing your own free shopping cart needn't be a nightmare - there are many discussion groups that espouse the virtues of easy-to-install and easy-to-use sites that do enough for a simple ecommerce solution. Emartcart (www.emartcart.com) offers a 'Lite' service that works with Paypal (or allows you to use a merchant account of your choice), and is a good option for small business who don't need to configure any more than 25 products and work with less than 45 orders a month. Commerce CGI (www.commerce-cgi.com) is easy to set up and offers free, open source software using Perl. It allows vendors to store unlimited products, is easy to update and offers online credit card processing. The PDG shopping cart (www.pdgsoft.com) is another option that includes some easy-to-change storefront layouts and secure payment systems, and is noted for its speed. CubeCart (www.cubecart.com) has gathered followers because of its straightforward installation and use for beginners, and includes payment gateways, secure socket layers and multiple payment methods.

Crystal Tech (www.crystaltech.com) produces an easy-to-use site that users claim is customisable and easy to integrate into existing websites, while Merchant Store (www.merchant-store.com) users claim that the free MySQL site caused no installation headaches and is easy to use.