If you need to sell your books on your website, have a look at these four solutions with their pros and cons.

There are hundreds of online shopping carts, and many of them are good, and a few are pretty bad. No solution is perfect, and there is no best solution for everyone. Here, I show four solutions for four basic ways of running your store from a website.

PayPal

Paypal is best for the fastest and simplest solution for getting a product link in your website. You can set up your account (you will need a free business standard account, not a consumer free account) to accept credit cards without your customer having to have a PayPal account. It is limited in options, and will not automatically manage your digital files.

Pros

• Very simple setup (about 2 minutes)
• Easy to add to nearly any website, the easiest on simple HTML
• PayPal manages all customer and sales data without setup

Cons

• Will not manage digital downloads
• No custom shipping or tax
• No customized look and feel; does not integrate well with your website theme

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress sites. It is a very good, out of the box solution for selling products, and you can manage digital products and physical products. It can accept strip, PayPal, and a few other options in the free settings, but it is the most extendable shopping cart platform in the world.

Pros

• Nearly unlimited features
• Complete control over shipping, tax, and payment processors
• Highly Documented, easy to set up

Cons

• Requires WordPress
• Most extra features are expensive
• Most automation requires JetPack (Which is a privacy nightmare)

eShop

eShop is an excellent cart for the Joomla CMS platform. It is not free out of the box, but supports digital downloads and many payment processors out of the box. It works with the Joomla Core, making customization easy for any Joomla developer, and the store aspect is easy and intuitive.

Pros

• Easy to understand store setup
• Complete control over shipping regions, tax, and payment solutions
• Seamless integration with Joomla website

Cons

• Requires Joomla
• Takes a lot of time to fully set up
• Not a free solution

ZenCart

The ZenCart platform is often touted as the best FOSS shopping cart solution. While parts of the technology feel a little old, the out-of-the-box security protocols make the platform a very secure solution. While it does have a lot of benefits, it is not intuitive to either set up or to manage, and the documentation is very limited.

Pros

• Highly Functional
• Security features enabled on install
• Supports a lot of payment processors for free

Cons

• Very difficult to use and set up
• Poor documentation
• No guest checkout

These are my thoughts to get you up and running on your shopping cart solutions. There are many more options to use as well. If you would like help with a cart technology, feel free to reach out to me for a quote.