Wednesday, July 11, 2007

FatFreeCart: Two Carts for the Price of Free

fatfreecartlogo.pngOnline ecommerce was over $100 billion last year. That consists of everything from Amazon.com to the knick knacks people sell on eBay. Last year, PayPal processed about 6% of all online payments worldwide ($11.36 billion). 40% of those sales originated outside of eBay properties, which often requires some kind of online shopping cart to manage the transactions.

PayPal has 133 million account holders and Google Checkout handles one transaction for every 70 that PayPal does, according to Hitwise. EJunkie has a simple free cut and paste solution to this problem for small sellers called FatFreeCart. It lets anyone easily put a shopping cart on their site. PayPal has their own cart creator, but FatFreeCart gives users more choice: both PayPal and Google Checkout can be used.

To install the cart on your site, you just need to cut and paste this code to your page and change the text in red, filling in details like merchant id, product description, and taxes. Customers can add and subtract items from their carts and commit to a final checkout by being taken to a prefilled order form on either of the services. When the order is completed, the merchant is notified of the purchase via email and can fulfill the order.

Readers interested in other simple web solutions should check out JS Kit’s website widgets.