First time online merchant usually find joy in the simple things - from creating their first HTML page to having a form to email to capture orders. While this is all well and good, it will not work if you are planning to take selling online seriously.

First things first, you need to get a good store template or have one custom made for you. You need to ensure that visitors to your site convert into buyers by offering good products, a good selling proposition and a design that pushes them to buy. You will also need to market your site online to capture the right set of audience. You can do this via SEO or through paid ads.

The second thing that will get you on your way to the big leagues is the ability to take credit card payments on your website. It really is the key to make ecommerce easy. To start, you will need an online shopping cart. An easy shopping cart works like it does in the real world. The customer goes to the store, browses through the different products available makes and selection and continues to shop for more items. Online, the shopping cart functions the same way. It temporarily holds products for the buyer while he or she continues to shop through your website.

But an online shopping cart is much more than that, it connects to your payment gateway, which in turn enables you to process credit card payments. This is where the online shopping cart plays a vital role. Credit cards are still the safest way to pay online. Credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard limit consumer liability for fraud at $50. Credit card companies allow merchants to close the transaction faster as the information can be transmitted electronically with the help of the online shopping cart and the payment gateway. This means you are also tapping into impulse buyers. Finally, credit cards make it easy to convert currencies. This is important as you are now competing in the global arena and may get buyers from any part of the world.

An online shopping cart isn't there to make your site look nice, it is also one of the best ways to improve the way you sell online. It creates a secure environment for payment processing on the client side. These are usually equipped with an SSL or Secure Sockets Layer certificate that encrypts data before sending it out to the web.