I am setting up a simple ecommerce site to sell about a dozen online services. I already have a merchant Account. Now I am looking for a shopping cart or template with a shopping cart that has been optimized for maximum Conversions. Can anybody point me in the right direction?
A shopping cart seems overkill for a dozen products/services. Why not just have a page for each with a paypal button?
The folks that study this sort of stuff tell me that an ecommerce site with only a paypal button would starve to death. A simple secured check out process that accepts anyform of payment is a must to optimize conversions.
OK maybe paypal isn't the best but you don't really need a full shopping cart. Just use a button to your payment gateway on the page instead of paypal.
I think mad may be correct in that you really don't need a "shopping cart" per say. It is easier to optimize for search engines without one. There are a number of free shopping carts out there that are simple, but you will still need a gateway, etc.. You can always use this shopping cart with gateway, merchant account, and more. (yes, affiliate link, but I use the system currently and have been for about 5 years)
All the sites my company runs that need shopping carts use 1ShoppingCart. The cart itself is really easy to use, and all you have to do is include a link or your own button graphic on otherwise search-engine optimized pages, so the cart doesn't interfere with SEO at all ... We've used this for close to a year now, and it's really simplified our business as well because you can also manage e-mail lists, set up autoresponders, etc. I'm a huge fan because it means the boss doesn't make me manually do all this stuff anymore.