Allright, I am developing a website for a client... however, I have never created a shopping cart before. My solution is to buy a shopping cart from a company, and then intergrate it into my website.. .however, I have a few questions that I coulden't really find answers too.

1). I looked at many shopping carts on the web, however.. most of them seem to be a collection of code that you can install. I was under the impression that shopping cart is stored on the server where the cart was bought from, along with all of the other product information? Then i would have to link that information to my site... can someone clarify this for me please?

2). I thought a shopping cart already cleared shopping transactions provided you had a valid merchant account. However, this does not seem to be the case. It looks like you have to purchase a Transaction Gateway from authrorize.net or something like that and then link your shopping cart to that?!?! im really confused...

3). Does anyone have any links, tutorials, books, websites, shopping carts, or gateways they would recommend? I'm also looking for a good webhost that has ASP support, not linux and PHP.

Thanks a bunch, any information would be useful!


Alek