Shopping cart software helps customers have a better shopping experience. You can use this software on your website for merchandise, services, or both. This software really makes the shopping experience easier and less confusing to your customers.

Some web sites may be able to forgo the use of an online shopping cart solution, but once a site gets to be a certain size it becomes too cumbersome to enter the inventory, shipping, handling, and delivery information from its customers manually. Only a very small company can cope with this, and then only will a small amount of inventory.

The shopping cart market is flooded with hundreds of different shopping carts you can choose from. But before you start on your journey, looking at product demos and interviewing vendors, it is important that you understand the two categories of shopping cart solutions:

1) An off-the-shelf shopping cart solution. Offers little customization but can be integrated with any website very quickly. Examples include: PayPal, MonsterCommerce, Yahoo Stores, InstantEStore and 1ShoppingCart to name a few.

These solutions are cheap, battle-tested and very scalable. Disadvantages are - very little customization options, limited support and you don't control the shopping experience.

2) Customized shopping cart based on a proven platform like XCart or OSCommerce. While typically more expensive to implement due to the time it takes to customize each platform, a customized shopping cart delivers full control to you as the merchant. You control the look and feel, shopping experience and any third-party plugins you wish to integrate.