Probably the most well-known ecommerce sites are the booksellers Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Sites like these are where ecommerce is at it’s most complex, because the shopping carts are custom designed and developed.

A custom shopping cart will have a merchant account and may host secure, encrypted webpages with digital certificates. These provide safe and trusted transactions and are written in a programming language, such as VBScript.

But if you are a website owner with a range of products to sell, the next best option is to use a ready-made shopping cart solution, such as Pace Retail or Actinic. You normally pay a monthly charge for a service like this.

However, the easiest way to get started with ecommerce is to use PayPal. You may recognise PayPal as they are owned by eBay, universally used for transactions on their auction site, and are a trusted payment provider.

PayPal is really easy to setup and use, especially if you have just a few products to sell. You can take credit card payments or debit the customer’s bank account and the money is transferred direct to your business account.

PayPal take 2-3% of each transaction as their payment and after setting up your account you add a ‘pay now’ button to your webpage. I have used PayPal to sell a product on the Internet. It was quick, simple and safe.

It’s about as easy as ecommerce gets.