E-commerce is booming and you want to put your mark on the Web. There are several great resources out there for businesses to get started in e-commerce without great expense. Isn't that nice to know?

To get started, you'll need to address the issues I mentioned in the previous articles: Preplanning your Web site and Site Planning.

There are some wonderful choices available for shopping carts.Paypal is a great choice if you are just starting out as an online vendor and want to avoid paying merchant account setup-fees. Paypal has a free shopping cart system, too.

One of my favorite starter-cart systems is Mal's E-commerce. It's a FREE cart system. Yes, free. Mal's will work with Paypal as well as a merchant account. Both require that you register on their sites to use their carts.

You might want to take a look at Miva, Cartkeeper, or X-Cart for a comparison of features to the free carts. These are affordable options that offer more features than the free carts.

Once you have chosen a cart system, you are going to have to decide how you want to collect payments. Do you plan to accept money orders and checks? How about credit cards? (I strongly recommend that you accept credit card payments in addition to checks and money orders, by the way.) How you are able to collect payments will probably influence the type of cart system you are able to use.

Let's take a look a credit card payments.

These points are basic, but hopefully they will get you inspired while thinking about what you want to say on your Web site. So, what do you want to say?