A shopping cart is a programme that bolts on to your website or blog.  It enables you to sell products and services on your website or blog and receive payments for them automatically online.

It is normally used in conjunction with a payment processing service like PayPal. PayPal processes the credit card, debit card, or bank account details of the purchaser independently from your site, so there are no issues for you about handling and storing sensitive personal information.

This gives the your customers the peace of mind that their financial information is safe and it gives you less work to do.

Once bolted on to your site, your shopping cart programme allows you to set up prices, stock codes, descriptions, sizes, colours and other options for your products and services.

To place the items for sale on your website, you then simply select them from a drop-down menu. Of course you could just cut and paste the PayPal buttons straight into your pages, but that means that you have to set everything up each time you do so, which can become very time consuming.

My favourite shopping cart is a plug-in for WordPress (this website and blog is written in WordPress). It is called WordPress eStore. I like it so much because it makes everything very easy to use, install and maintain, but most of all (and unlike many other shopping carts), it allows you to sell large digital downloads like audio and video files and deliver them securely be e-mail with time limited links.

Having installed your shopping cart, you can then import your PayPal transactions directly into accounting software like KashFlow and virtually automate the entire sales process.

So if you have products or services that you could sell online, get yourself a shopping cart.

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