So you’ve decided you want to sell your products online. That’s about as smart a choice as you can make for your business in this day and age. But how do you go about it? There are so many “solutions” out there, that it is very easy to get lost and confused in it all.

First things first, you will want to decide if you can get away with something simple like PayPal, or if you want full on payment integration. PayPal is relatively simple to set up, and you only end up paying money when you are making money. Full payment integration on the other hand usually comes with a monthly fee, regardless of whether you’ve sold anything or not, on top of it being much more difficult to implement.

If you decide to go the PayPal route since you’re just starting out and it can somewhat fit your needs, great. If not, proceed carefully. There are many pre-made shopping carts offered at what would seem like a really low price. However, cheapness always comes with a price. Said service may only be twenty dollars a month to start using, but you will soon come to realize that you’ve gotten yourself into really deep water.

First of all, you will be left on your own to try to figure out how to use it and integrate it to your existing website. Once you have found the time to do so, and taken the time to do so, several months will probably have passed, if you’re like most business owners. Once you have figured it out, it probably won’t work seamlessly without a lot of adjustments, because it of course, was not built for your particular website and is just a one size fits all shopping cart.

Then comes the data entry of all of your products, which is usually not very user friendly, and will typically come with limitations to things such as how many photos you can upload, unless you pay more of course. By the time you get everything sorted out, it will kind of work how you wanted it to, although the cart won’t properly match the look and feel of your site, and will be riddled with quirks here and there that will still take untold hours to fix.

Your other option is to have us develop a fully custom designed shopping cart for you, which at first glance might seem expensive. But how much is your time worth? The pre-made option promises you countless hours of trying to figure it out yourself, which will take months of your own time when your shopping cart could have been up and running and producing income. In many cases we end up with clients that tried to do the first option, spent a lot of time and money on it, and still ended up signing up with us because they couldn’t get it to work properly.

A custom designed shopping cart will work seamlessly with the rest of your website, will match the rest of your site, and will be delivered to you working and ready to go, with a relatively low turn-around time. On top of that, you will own it. Most pre-made shopping carts will disappear as soon as you decide you don’t want to pay their monthly fee anymore. A custom designed cart has no monthly fee, and is part of your site. You can sell it as an asset to your business if you really wanted to. The bottom line is, there are only advantages to having a custom made cart, while pretty much all disadvantages to going the other route.

Contact us today for all of your Custom Design, Online Marketing, and shopping cart needs.