This is an interesting question. Why, truly does anyone need a shoppingcart ?

Before you give me the regular buzz joy answers like – ‘So we can do shopping’

Let me tell you that this is actually the correct answer. We need shoppingcarts so that people can go shopping. In the same way that it’s possible to buy a single item here or there without the use of a physical shoppingcart, it would sound as if it should be possible for a vendor to sell a single item like a book without the complex expense and set up of a shopping cart.

7-8 years ago, this would have been possible, and I and many others have in fact done exactly that. So, what has changed ?

Visa requirements for better security, for one. Any high-school kid can put an html form together with a book for sale, and a request for a user’s credit card information but this is entirely disallowed and if you did this now, you would eventually lose your all important merchant account.

The solution, since the PCI Compliance issues, is to either put the front end of the shopping cart on your local webserver but ensure that the user is pushed to a Visa compliant online merchant in order for the credit card information to be captured outside of your system or put the entire shoppingcart on the super fast servers of a PCI Compliant hosted solution like 1shoppingcart, MonsterCommerce** or Yahoo Stores etc.

The online Merchant Account that you require for dumping the millions into your bank account would also require that the capture portion of the sensitive Visa information be captured only on a PCI compliant system.

I have seen a few non compliant systems operating out of Brazil and other non North American/Non European Countries however its just a matter of time before these vendors are caught and their merchant accounts are revoked.

So, long and short, to sell online, you will need a shopping cart of some sort whether hosted or not, a merchant account ( which could in some cases be paypal ) and a PCI Compliant system to take that visa information securely.

Hosted ShoppingCart systems that can be considered for the purposes of the discussion in this article are

• MonsterCommerce**
• GoogleCheckout
• YahooStores
• 1ShoppingCart
• Volusion

Major non hosted solutions that still require PCI Compliance for Visa and Merchant Accounts are

• ZenCart
• OsCommerce
• Magenta

The 3 opensource systems above are all free, but require a significant amount of technical know how in order to implement and maintain. If you don’t know what **LAMP** is or have immediate access to a technical person who knows exactly what lamp is and how its to be implemented then I would hesitate to  go forward with opensource solutions without this background.

LAMP stands for Linux/Apache/Mysql/Php. Solaris, Apache,Postgres and Php might work too, but its much easier to go with the standard if you are about to rent or lease a dedicated machine for a project like this.

**Update : MonsterCommerce has been taken over by NetworkSolutions, so the shoppingcart used by thousands is now an unbranded product somewhat hidden inside the clunky Networksolutions interface. In its day, monstercommerce was inarguably one of the top 3 shopping cart products in the world. While the product is probably still being updated by the great technicians over at networksolutions the question would be how much emphasis is the new mother company putting into the product.