Unfortunately, when it comes to selling online, the terminology is all over the place. Generally speaking, the term "ecommerce" means to sell online. More specifically, the tools needed to do this are called a variety of things, yet they are pretty much the same for the most part. Here are a few:
With that out of the way, let's get down to business. finding a good, cheap shopping cart software is much more difficult than finding cheap hosting; and that is because your business will likely have many business requirements that may be very unique to your busienss. Let me re-iterate: features are what tend to separate one cart from another. And the bigger your online store will be, the more demanding the requirements tend to get.
Features can range from everything from being search engine optimized, to the way products are displayed on the site. Even outside of the feature set, you should consider factors like how well is the cart designed to convert shoppers into buyers, and what ways you might be able to tie into the cart with custom software if needed. Equally important are all the pieces that you don't see such as: order processing and fulfillment tools, customer manager, product and category manager, reporting tools, marketing tools, etc... A single good marketing tool, like the ability to push your products out to shopping search engines like Google and Yahoo Shopping can easily double the sales of some businesses.
Rather than go into depth, which would take a good 300 page book to cover the basics, we have simply compiled a list of the best carts for the money, divided up into classes.
