There are two elements in selling products or services on the internet: the brand and the price. You can have a band specialist to give you an appropriate advice; you can have also products to sell from a well known brand too. An efficient solution is to start an ecommerce website. The ecommerce shopping carts are there to solve the niche products payment problem. If you re selling products, or e-books, or something like Paypal, you will obtain significant results. If your products and services are demanding large databases, multiple currencies, then the solution becomes more expensive and complex.

It is not easy to choose the shopping carts. First of all, you must make a list of your criteria; you must to establish the products list, the multiple choices between the products, multiple languages, tax and shipping possibilities, multiple currencies, gift coupons, stock control, database driven, gift coupons, affiliate processing, credit card processing. The most important aspect is the ease use for the customer. A friendly and easy to navigate site are essential for your business development.

When every detail will be clarified, you’ll have to make the shopping cart selection and you must to find the ones who are very popular and match your criteria.

Investigating the huge amount of shopping carts, you will never find the ideal one. You must select to possibility that is offering a very wide range of possibilities. The shopping cart must have some very important possibilities: multiple products, multiple choices between currencies, multiple languages, bulk input, gift coupons, stock control, database driven, shipping tracking, and ease of setting up, credit card processing.

If you are only a few products, or if you sell e-books, o if you are collecting donations / subscriptions, a good and simple solution is Paypal. There is also 2Checkout, who combine a simple shopping cart with and Ecommerce Payment Gateway and Merchant type Account facility. 
 
Here are a few basic information about there solutions:

a. Paypal (www.paypal.com)

This belongs to eBay, the world’s biggest online auction. The clients can open a Paypal account free, but there are some verification to be done. You must verify your bank account and contract details. Each transaction is updated into your bank account. The money made from sales can be automatically transferred into your bank account, but your normal banking fees will be charged on this service.

You must also take all the precautions you need to avoid the un-encrypted payments, to protect the money transfer from any possible fraud.
Paypal can be incorporated without problems in your shopping cart system, allowing the sale of multiple products at different prices in one transaction).
 
b. 2Checkout (2checkout.com)

This is a third party payment processor asking for a small setup fee. It can be used in a shopping cart system. It accepts credit cards from people around the world, transferring the money into your bank account.

c. ClickBAnk (clickbank.com)

ClickBank is a third party payment processor. It is oriented to e-books, one time membership’s fees, software programs. Its requirement is to pay a small fee to open an account. You will receive two times in a month a check for all the sales made during this period of time. Using ClickBank for your niche products is allowing you to set up an affiliate program through them and they will automatically pay your affiliates for every sale.  

ClickBank isn’t allowing you to incorporate it into a shopping cart system.

d. Digibuy (www.digibuy.com)

This is another system aloowing you to pay only downloadable products, like e-books, software programs, membership fee. It is not appropriate for the affiliate payment systems.

Like ClickBank, Digibuy can only be used if you sell digital products or services that can be downloaded, the major advantage of using Digibuy is that you can use a shopping cart with their payment gateway (i.e. you can sell multiple products). It allows you to accept alternate payment forms through them, instead of the credit cards.