Shopping carts are a vital feature for e-commerce websites. Just like a physical shopping cart in the real world, a website's shopping cart allows the site's visitors to fill it with inventory from the site, and hold onto it until checkout. HostGator supports the use of several different shopping carts, including those that come as addons to content management systems like Joomla. They also offer their users SSL certificates, which are vital to protecting their customers' credit card and address information.
Shopping carts are extremely useful utilities for regular e-commerce sites, or even just sites that require users to pay for access to premium site content. There's virtually no way to have an efficient, user-friendly e-commerce site without some type of shopping cart utility. Fortunately, HostGator allows their users to pick from a number of different shopping carts. Users can choose to install an addon to their content management system that will allow them to integrate shopping carts into their WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or other content management system-based website. Joomla, for one, has several different free plugins that allow its users to create shopping carts.
Even if they are not using one of these content management systems for their website, users can still go through cPanel and use QuickInstall to set up Zen Cart, PrestaShop, TomatoCart, or another shopping cart utility. These allow their users to sell products or services, including subscriptions and digital products.
Another key feature that HostGator offers their users are SSL. SSL stands for secure socket layers, which is a method that websites use to encrypt information. SSL lets shoppers on an e-commerce site securely transmit their payment and address information to the site without having to worry about it falling into unauthorized hands. All of HostGator's hosting accounts have some type of SSL protection. Their lower-priced shared hosting accounts have shared SSL, while their Business-level shared hosting offers private SSL. This is the only difference between their top-tier and mid-level shared hosting plans, but it's a pretty big one.
For users with e-commerce sites, it makes sense to pay for the upgrade to private SSL. Shared SSL tends to cause warnings to pop up with most browsers, which can make a site look less trustworthy. This is generally not an issue with private SSL, so visitors will feel safer submitting sensitive information like their addresses and credit card numbers. As a result, sites with private SSL tend to attract more customers than those that just have shared SSL.
HostGator is an ideal host for people who need reliable, inexpensive, easy-to-use hosting for their e-commerce sites. They allow their users to integrate their choice of shopping cart into their HostGator account, and pick from shared or private SSL. Their shared hosting plans start at less than $4 per month, while their Business-level hosting is only $10.36 monthly. With the freedom and versatility that HostGator allows their users, it's no wonder why they've become one of the most popular web hosts for e-commerce sites.
