Use your Internet provider's shopping-cart solution

Many Internet service providers offer Web store hosting services that include shopping carts. The primary benefit of going through your ISP is compatibility with your Web servers and the ease of working with one service provider.

I recommend: Examine your ISP's offerings and consider switching if you need to. Here are a few ISPs that offer integrated shopping carts: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Network Solutions, PowWeb and VistaPages. Also see Web Hosting Blog Review for more.

Integrate specialty shopping-cart software with your site

If you have a high volume of online transactions or a large inventory of items for sales, you can buy ecommerce software with more feature-rich shopping cart applications that help with everything from inventory control to marketing.

I recommend: Check out CNET's shopping cart reviews, TopTenREVIEWS' Shopping Cart Software Review or Shopping Cart Reviews.

Get a free shopping-cart solution

There are some solid free shopping cart solutions available, but they tend to require more upfront integration work and technical knowledge to implement.

I recommend: Check out ZenCart and osCommerce.

Leverage eBay and PayPal

You can use these two popular ecommerce services as low-rent shopping car services.

I recommend: eBay Stores lets you build a Web site storefront as well as simply sell items online without a storefront. PayPal Merchant Tools lets you utilize PayPal to accept payments over the Web, with or without credit cards, but doesn't replace shopping carts for higher-volume transactions.

Get more shopping-cart savvy

Cart applications are one part of increasingly sophisticated ecommerce systems that can handle tax payments, shipping deals, cross-selling and upselling, inventory and more. It pays to keep up with carts.

I recommend: Read e-commerce how-to guides from WebMonkey and Entrepreneur.