We install shopping carts for some of our customers, so when the time came to gear up to sell our own things, we naturally expected to include a shopping cart.
However, the cart we have used for customers requires payment of a liscense fee for each domain on which it is installed. That is not attractive when your whole selling strategy is based around selling from many niche websites. We looked at a variety of "free" shopping carts but they all come with a LOT of overhead. The learning curves are steep and the amount of detail required to list a product is high. The economics of traditional shopping carts don't work if you are trying to sell lots of small products for a profit.
We have come up with a couple of ideas of how we might handle sales of these items that still leave some profit for us. We are not sure how well they will work, since they deviate significantly from conventional shopping cart wisdom. However, we suspect the "right" method depends on many factors and is poorly understood.
One breakthrough concept: We don'e need to be able to assign any price to our products. We will be selling inexpensive items so we only need a choice of $4.95, $9.95, $14,95 etc. To keep things simple we can bundle shipping and handling into the cost of everything. We can promise on the website to refund shipping overcharges is people buy multiple items. The result is the backend calculations become much more simple. It will be interesting to see how it works.
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