I have no experiance with online shopping carts (though offline, that is a completely other story lol!). Anyway, what I'm wondering is, are the shopping carts that paypal offers simple to impliment, and do they do a good job?

Can you modify them in ways to make them do certain things that you want to do? For instance, I wish to sell online products, that once someone buys something, it gets sent to them, as soon as the money arrives in the account. Since they are images, or stories or other digital media, this shouldn't be a problem, right?

Or do I have to go and email the people their products once they've bought them?

I don't know how extensive shopping carts can be. Is this sort of thing something that I've have to code into my site?

Plus, I wouldn't mind it, if after someone purchased something, and I've received the money in Paypal, that the item is removed from my site. Again, is this possible to do... even if I have to write some codes or something on my site.

I don't really know much about e-commerce, and any insights would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Well I didn't know Paypal offers a 'shopping cart'.
My thinking is that you will need a 'store' (web site) to display and present the goods for sale whether they be physical objects or intellectual properties (downloads). and then a method of allowing buyers to 'collect' the goodies (shopping cart). The cart would gather everything in to let you determine the prices, taxes, shipping, etc then present them with a bill. The Paypal would or could be their method of payment. Alternatives to Paypal could be another e-payent method such as a credit card.
There is at least one 'shopping cart' available in the fantastico section of the cpanel. Might want to check that out.

I was looking into that other cart that is offered in our cpanel... but I hadn't heard of the payment options. It did let you use paypal as an option, but you'd have to upgrade for that which costed extra money that I just don't want to pay right now.

I was looking into other shopping carts out there, and read that paypal has one of there own. Since I'm already a member, I would prefer to get payments made to there, if I am so lucky as to actually sell something (I'm keeping my fingers crossed).

From what I can tell, I have to make my own store, and then I tell the paypal forms what the items are and the costs for such items and all that, and they make me a 'purchase now' sort of button. Once the user clicks it, the item is added into their shopping cart until they check out. Perhaps, after something is purchased, I'll have to manually remove the items, until I've figured out what else to do.

I really really want to have a way that'll allow me to send the 'intellectual properties' as you called them (I like that by the way... I'm going to have to hold onto that one... ) immediately after purchase so that people don't have to wait. I don't think many people would want to wait for anything that is just going to be sent to them over the internet. Mind you, I suppose that could be what is being done on ebay when people buy ebooks and such, so I guess it wouldn't be so bad, but I'd really rather send them right away.

As for methods of payment... I believe I read somewhere that paypal allows for credit card payments, even if you don't have a paypal account already, or if you do, then you can use your account funds. I'm not positive on this though. You might not want to quote me

To get the shopping cart function of paypal, I did have to upgrade to a Premier Account, which I'm assuming is free, because they didn't charge me anything for it. But they make the money by taking a small percentage of the money that is transferred into my account. I don't mind this, because in other places that I've been working with, the cut was outrageous - like 40%! So, I figure this can't be so bad. It was something like a flat fee of 30 cents per transaction plus 3% of the total paid or something. And another couple percent if they need to convert the currency for you.

Okay, that was a lot more than I expected to say... but it's all that I know for now... so I'd love to hear anything else that anyone has to say