Below are a few ideas and considerations pertaining to simple e-commerce solutions. There are essentially three components to consider for a proper e-commerce solution:

1. A Shopping Cart System
2. A Payment Gateway
3. A Bank Account (often a Merchant Account)

There are any number of ways to meet these requirements. The most common approach to online sales is to run shopping cart software of your own (number 1 above). We create e-commerce sites with Magento, an open-source solution that allows us to produce well-designed, functional e-commerce website. Not only are Magento sites easy-to-update, but Magento also offers a number of handy features, such as customer accounts which include an overview of: recent orders, personal information, primary billing address, primary shipping address, shopping cart, wishlist, recently ordered items, recently reviews and recent tags.

Perhaps these bells and whistles aren’t what you are looking for. You might also consider a simple PayPal website. PayPal PayPal provides services 1 and 2, and even sometimes 3. PayPal handles donations, subscriptions and regular sales. It works well with Ladybug , becomes your shopping cart, processes the sale, and can even automatically make the deposits. This is why we often choose PayPal for our simple e-commerce solutions.

From our experience, the main disadvantage to PayPal is primarily that the checkout portion is not very branded, so it is obvious to anyone that you using a PayPal shopping cart when they check out. Not to mention, they’re getting directed to another site! One big win is that you don’t need to worry about much, they’re an end-to-end solution. You just have to worry about keeping your website looking good, and PayPal takes care of the rest.