Own Website Plus Externally Hosted Shopping Cart

This option offers much more flexibility than the fully hosted option but requires slightly more technical ability to setup and configure.

In this case the website is setup and then the shopping cart is integrated into the website.

The website is hosted on a server of your choice and the shopping cart provider is sourced from a third party provider of your choice.

How it Works

You setup a website or use an existing site and integrate the shopping cart into the site by simply pasting in code provided by the third part provider.

Again you don't have to worry about security, backups, upgrades etc as this is all done by the provider.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

Very Flexible
No additional software required
Easy to use
Page layout is very flexible as there are no php/asp template tags just html which can go anywhere without requiring a special template.
Search Engine friendly as existing html pages are being used

Disadvantages

Can be as expensive as a fully hosted solution.
Can be more difficult to setup than a fully hosted store as you will need to configure the store side and then the website.
You don't have complete control of your product database and could have problems when moving away from the provider for any reason.
Not as Flexible as own hosted store.

Suitability

Small stores with small number of products (around 200).
Existing Sites that want to sell products
New Website/store owners

Shops to take a look at-

Romancart- This works on the same principal as the paypal buy now buttons but with made very easy to use and setup. They offer free trial version so that you can explore the features before committing yourself.

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