Shopping Carts Web Hosting

What Is an Online Shopping Cart?

An online shopping cart is a metaphor for making sense of the online shopping experience for customers whose shopping experience is rooted in the storefront experience. Calling the steps, a number of which cannot be seen, names that relate to the familiar actions of the physical storefront makes the process familiar and understandable. As in a grocery store, customers select merchandise, choosing number, type, color, etc. of items and the software saving the description of each item is made concrete by calling it "adding the item to the shopping cart." As with grocery shopping, when the online shopper reaches the checkout, all the items selected along the way are "present," but the customer can still make changes up until the point at which he or she provides payment. 

Two Types of Web Hosts With Shopping Carts

You can think of there being two kinds of web hosts with shopping carts: there is the kind that offers a web hosting package that is completely centered around the shopping cart functionality, and there is the kind for which the shopping cart is just one feature of a more general offering of webhosting products and services. It is the second kind that would most likely be referred to as shopping carts web hosting, but both types serve ecommerce websites, depending on what their needs are.

Shopping carts web hosts in that sense generally offer several levels of shopping cart software or service. Whereas with a web host who just has an available shopping cart, quite a lot of the shopping cart configuration is left up to the webmaster, with a shopping carts web host, the shopping cart configuration is taken care of, and the customer just focuses on personalizing the site for his or her brand and filling in the merchandise. This type of pre-configured shopping cart does include certain limitations, and these limitations are what makes the different levels of shopping cart service.

An  Example of Shopping Carts Web Hosting and Web Hosting with Shopping Carts

The GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart makes GoDaddy one example of a shopping cart web host. This service has an Economy, Deluxe, and Premium level. At the economy level, you can only have 20 products in your catalog, with one image per product, 50 MB of diskspace and 1 GB of bandwidth. Deluxe, which costs 3 times as much, allows you to have 100 products, five images for each product, 1 GB of online space, and 50 GB of bandwidth. For 5 times what you pay for the Economy package, you can have unlimited products, 5 images for each one, 2 GB of disk space, and 100 GB of bandwidth.

BlueHost, on the other hand, offers a general webhosting package with 4 shopping carts: OS Commerce Shopping Cart, Agora Shopping Cart, Cube Cart Shopping Cart, and Zen Cart Shopping Cart in a package with unlimited disk storage and unlimited file transfer, all for a price lower than GoDaddy's Economy Cart. But, you have to configure the cart yourself. Only you can say which shopping cart web host is a better fit for you.