If you are searching around for a good shopping cart, then you will find these carts shopping techniques useful. With all the different choices available, comparing these shopping cart software can get confusing. I've listed the top 5 things to look out for when shopping around for ecommerce software.

1. Shopping Cart is Easy To Use

This is the first thing you should pay attention to. The simple fact is that building your online store will NOT make you money. You only make money when you market your completed store and sell something. So, it's crucially important that you can get started immediately building your store without much training required. The best shopping cart software are intuitive and it should be obvious how to get started without reading a manual. So, find one that you are most comfortable with and build your store quickly. Then market the hell out of it! Most of the time, the dedicated shopping cart software providers like Yahoo! Store, InstanteStore Shopping Cart Software, MonsterCommerce and Volusion do very well here.
2. Stable & Fast Hosting Included with Shopping Cart Solution

There's no use having an ecommerce store with all the bells and whistles if it isn't online, taking orders for you. So, make sure to check the provider's server uptime records when carts shopping. Most reputable companies can give you their server's uptime data if you ask for it. Apart from being available all the time, check that your store pages load up quickly enough. Of course, you can't expect your page to load up quickly if you have it bogged down with hundreds of images and animations. However, you should try testing the different providers with the same store content and see which one loads up more quickly for you. You can bet your website visitors will thank you for it by buying more from your store .

3. Solution Generates Search Engine Optimized Pages

This is a big one. It's always nice to get free traffic from the organic search engines. As such, make sure your chosen shopping cart generates search engine optimized content. For a start, make sure the product category and product pages use static URLs. Beware of shopping carts that generate important pages with dynamic URLs. You can recognize dynamic URLs because it contains a question mark (?) like such http://www.yourdomain.com/products.asp?GenID=2. Try to stay away from these solutions since search engine spiders will only crawl a limited number of pages with dynamic URLs on your store.

Apart from using static URLs, make sure the ecommerce software automatically optimizes your page's HTML title, keywords and description meta tags. If it optimizes your internal linking structure, all the better. You only want to pass "link juice" to pages that are important, not peripheral pages like your privacy policy or about us sections. Having an automatic Google sitemap is also a plus point since it'll help the spiders crawl your store's pages.
4. Marketing Tools Included with Ecommerce Software

Especially when you're first starting off, you do not want to spend too much time and money buying and learning all the different search engine optimization software, newsletter management software, affiliate management software and such. So, look out for solutions that include at least basic marketing tools to let you start marketing your store immediately. Essential tools are:

• good affiliate management system
• newsletter management system
• flexible customer contact solution that allows you to contact different segments of your customer database
• advertisement tracking solution

5. Shopping Cart is Continually Developed & Improved

It's a fact that technology moves so quickly online. What was cool in year 2000 is no longer chic in 2007. So, make sure your shopping cart provider is continually developing new upgrades to the solution and making it better. The best would be companies that actually listen to what you have to say. Hunt for such companies who ask their clients when developing new upgrades. That's the sign of a company who have your best interests in mind!

I hope these five points I've shared above will help you in your carts shopping "trip". The best advice I can give you is to spend no more than 5-7 hours maximum shopping around. It's almost always better to select one that you think will be good and just jump in to try it out. Remember, doing carts shopping isn't going to make you any money. You only generate revenue when you've completed your store and someone buys from you…

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I will be doing a thorough review and comparison of all the top ecommerce hosting web providers. Although I've already compiled a list of what I think are the top ecommerce web hosts, if you think your current hosting provider is great, please add it to the list by posting a comment. I'm looking for ecommerce hosting web providers rather than ecommerce solutions.

There is a fine line between the two. On the one hand, "ecommerce hosts" are generally web hosting companies that provide some sort of shopping cart software with the hosting account. The focus is mainly on the hosting rather than the ecommerce software. These ecommerce hosting accounts generally cost anywhere from $10 to $40 per month. Several examples of ecommerce webhosts are Media3, Hostway, APlus.net, HostMySite, ValueWeb and such. All are hosting companies that also provide ecommerce hosting in addition to general web hosting accounts.
Ecommerce solution providers meanwhile are more specialized and normally do NOT offer any other type of hosting apart from ecommerce hosting. They all run proprietary ecommerce software that are generally very easy to use, even for beginners. The focus is on the actual ecommerce software with hosting included. These packages tend to cost more, ranging from $40 to $150 per month. Several notable ecommerce solution providers are MonsterCommerce, Volusion, InstanteStore, Yahoo! Store and 3DCart.

I'll be doing a review on ecommerce hosts first. So, please help me by posting comments on your ecommerce hosting web provider if you think what they offer is great.

Thanks for your help!

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