In most instances, it is most practical to avoid 'reinventing the wheel' by building a shopping cart from the ground up.

Off the shelf carts can now support most popular business models:
- Selling many products online
- Selling one or several products online
- Selling instant access to online files or services

Off the shelf carts can also support most popular payment methods:
- Realtime credit card processing
- Realtime payment by PayPal
- Delivery of credit card details by encrypted GPG email
- Payment with prepurchased gift certificates.

osCommerce is an example of a shopping cart than can cater to each of these requirements. Ilisys E-Commerce Support (ecommerce@ilisys.com.au or 1800 995 641) will assist you with installation.

Should you choose to use a cart other than osCommerce, be sure that it can be modified to operate under PHP safe mode, as this is active within the Linux hosting cluster.