Mals-e

Mals-e is a free shopping cart system that allows you to add your own buy-now buttons to any webpage, customize your shopping cart pages and start selling online. Sell as many products as you like, Mals-e can handle all sorts of transactions, including selling downloadable goods (like ebooks)  and accepting donations.

Cost: Free. Premium accounts start at only $8 per month

Supported payment types: PayPal Standard, Nochex and Paymate, checks/money orders, or you can also save credit card data (encrypted) to process later manually. They do not process cards, you MUST have a merchant account. If you upgrade to a Premium account, you have access to  PayPal, Authorize.net, 2Checkout, WorldPay, plus over a dozen others.

Supported shipping options: Supports up to 8 different shipping methods, like flat fee shipping, shipping by price, by weight. The premium version also  integrates with UPS, Fedex and USPS rate service.

Pros: Free SSL. Excellent if you need to accept online credit card payments but cannot afford to purchase your own secure certificate (Go Daddy sells them for $30 and up ). Free built-in mTracker script, allowing you to set up your own affiliate program.

Cons: Users are directed away from your website to checkout and make payment.

My thoughts: I have worked with clients using Mals-e for almost 8 years and never had any troubles with it. If you are working with a limited budget and need to set up a basic cart, Mals-e should work okay for you. The main downside to using this cart is that you have to work with HTML to add the code to your web pages.

Where to download: Visit their website to set up your account.

Related tutorials that might interest you:

Free shopping carts
osCommerce
Zen Cart
X-Cart Pro
3DCart

Added by Gerae on Monday, June 8th, 2009 in Shopping Carts.