Before anything else, you should know that e commerce shopping cart software should have two important characteristics. First, it has to provide the easiest and safest features for online payments and second, it should allow the store owner, in this case you, update the store inventory with ease.
There are several types of hosted shopping cart solutions. There is the free software and there is software that costs on a monthly basis. Of course, you have to pay for the professional ones, as any of them offers a wide range of features. Because of this, it might be very difficult in choosing the right one for your business. How can you know which one fits your business needs and your customers demands?
You have to decide between paid or free services, based on your needs. One thing to consider is that, usually, not all of those free services are truly professional, as they state. You also have to consider your budget, whether you are able to spend any money on these kinds of services. In case that your business is not yet profitable, then you have no other choice but to choose a free service. Anyway, before doing this, you should also think about your long term goals and, if you think that this investment is a necessity, than you should do some extra efforts in paying the appropriate service provider.
Another thing you should consider when deciding between paid or free services, is that, later on, when you are going to have a bigger business, which service is going to be more difficult and more expensive to transfer all the data onto another platform. Make sure any free services you use allow you to export your database of products for easy import into another more professional hosted shopping cart solution.
A professional provider is going to provide you with excellent solutions, no matter what packet you are going to choose. These features are going to help you in creating a professional and sophisticated online shop, presenting an interesting and attractive design, for the customers, and some ease of use. These options, give you the possibility of adding new, professionally designed pages at any time.
Besides all these options, any paid hosted shopping cart service is able to provide you with the latest SEO tools, for a proper optimization of your website. They usually have their own search engines, which automatically promotes your site. These features are going to help you by providing you with optimized titles for your catalogs, and as well, well structured internal links.