The present age is the age of e-commerce. Every day, millions of transactions take place on eBay and Amazon. Furthermore, because of the global economic downturn, every single dollar that you make contributes towards securing your financial future. Therefore, it becomes imperative for webmasters all over the world to harness the power of e-commerce. By incorporating e-commerce capabilities into your website, you can not only enhance the experience of your visitors by complimenting your site's content with related services offered by you or other vendors, but you can also ensure that your site continues to generate some extra residual income which can be of great help to you over the course of time.

E-commerce web hosting companies deal with exactly this aspect of a webmaster's endeavors. The offer of e-commerce functionality by a web hosting company implies that you get the ability to incorporate shopping carts into your website that can accept a wide variety of credit cards and PayPal payments etc. In the past, only a few specialized web hosting companies could offer e-commerce functionality which often used to cost more than a normal web hosting plan without e-commerce features. However, with the competition increasing fiercely among web hosting providers nowadays, more and more companies are including e-commerce features as part of their hosting plans.

The most common e-commerce applications included by a great majority of hosting providers include the Agora shopping cart, the osCommerce shopping cart, along with the integration of PayPal into the shopping cart. However there are better web hosting companies such as BlueHost that also offer the Cube Cart shopping cart and the Zen Cart shopping cart in addition to the shopping carts mentioned above. The greater the number of shopping carts offered by the web hosting provider in question, the more options you have of selecting and incorporating the one which is the simplest for the customer to interact with and which is also secure from the transactional point of view.

Furthermore, when looking for an e-commerce web hosting company, you might also want to look for a feature referred to as the SSL secure server. SSL stands for "Secure Sockets Layer" and it acts as a barrier in order to prevent intruders from stealing the credit card information of your customers. When you incorporate this feature into your website, any prospective customer who clicks on your "buy now" link is taken to an order page with an "https" URL, which stands for "hypertext transfer protocol secure". This gives your prospective clients the peace of mind that their financial information is in safe hands. The SSL feature generally comes for an extra price, however BlueHost also offers this functionality as part of its hosting plan for no extra cost.