How to Pick a Shopping Cart: 7 Carts Reviewed

Selling online can be a great way to expand an existing business or start a new one. Sites like eBay and Etsy let you sell within their sites and use their shopping carts. You benefit from their traffic and marketing but they control the look and functionality of their site.

The other option is to sell through your own web site. To do so, you need

• a shopping cart
• a payment-processing gateway, and
• a process to fulfill orders.

In this article we’ll mostly look at shopping carts, but we’ll also touch on how you might handle payments and other cart-related issues. We won’t discuss how to find and deliver a product to customers—I’ll assume that you’ve got that part covered.

For this article, I tested seven shopping carts: three simple site add-ons (PayPal, Google Checkout, and Mal's e-commerce; two regular shopping carts (Zen Cart and digiSHOP), and two third-party hosted carts (Network Solutions Ecommerce and CoreCommerce). Despite all of these options, at the end of the day you may need a custom shopping cart, so I’ll also cover some aspects to consider when building your own eCommerce system.

The carts mentioned here are not the only carts available—for example, Yahoo Small Business and Squirrelcart (which has my favorite mascot) and X-Cart are further options you could seek out. However, the method I’ve used to evaluate these carts can be used to appraise any shopping cart—ultimately, it’s your online business.

Where to Start?

When a client asks me to help them find a shopping cart, I often start with the feature lists from different cart vendors. I copy all the features into a column in a spreadsheet, and add a column for my client to assign priorities: 1 = must have, 2 = should have, or 3 = nice to have. Then we sort features by priority and add columns for each cart we consider. This feature-oriented process helps my clients focus on what they need. Using a feature list helps figure out whether they need a basic cart or a more complex one.

While we’re looking through the feature list, I work with them to understand exactly what they want to accomplish. Is the online business their entire business or just part of it? Does the shopping cart need to integrate with their accounting system, for example, QuickBooks? What are their products and how complex are their products—for example, will they offer quantity discounts?

There are other important cart features to test. Can customers see their order status online? Can you easily edit all outbound emails used to confirm sales, notify customers when a product is shipped, and so on? If your online business has several employees, can you restrict the reporting to just certain users? How hard is it to add options to products?

Another great question to ask is, how is credit card data stored in the database? Credit card processing companies have strict rules about storing card data. My advice: avoid storing any important customer data. Let payment-processing services handle that risk.

Once you’ve evaluated all the features you need?and sorted them into “must have,” “should have,” and “nice to have” features, the next step is to evaluate actual shopping carts to determine what works best for your business.

Simple Carts

If you’ve only a few products to sell, or you want to test the waters, then you have two options for selling online. One is to use an existing site such as eBay, Half.com, Etsy, or a similar site. For example, my wife sells all our spare books on Half.com because it makes no sense to bother with anything more complicated.

Your second option, when you have only a few items to sell, is to use the payment-processing capabilities of another online service, for example, PayPal, Google Checkout, or Mal’s e-commerce. These ”add-on’ carts work especially well if you have a web site that already exists. They let you use their site to configure your products, and they generate payment button code that you can copy and paste into your web pages. The code creates a button on your web page that, when clicked, sends the site visitor through their service for payment.

Let’s look at three popular add-on solutions:

PayPal

http://www.paypal.com/

PayPal is an online payment processor—currently owned by eBay—that processes credit cards, as well as transactions members make within their private network. Most people are aware of the private network payments, but don’t realize that PayPal also handles payments through major credit cards and electronic checks.

To use PayPal as a cart, you’ll need to register an account with them. This involves setting up a PayPal account, then linking a bank account to your PayPal account. To validate your bank account, PayPal deposits a small amount into your account, say 11 cents, and you log in and tell them the amount they deposited.

To create a product within your PayPal account, select the Products and Services tab on your main account page, then the Website Payments Standard link on the Products and Services page. This takes you to a Buy Now Buttons page. Select the type of payment button you want then follow the directions to work with their Button Factory. You’ll see a chunk of code at the end of the process that you can paste into your web site. It’s a fairly easy three-page process to create a button or email link to a product you sell.

PayPal currently charges 1.9–2.9% of transaction cost plus 30 cents (USD) per transaction. There are no monthly fees and no setup costs. They provide detailed accounting for anything sold using their Buy Now buttons.

Support for PayPal is through their online help pages, email, or phone. They’re a large organization and it can take time to get a proper response. But the response typically is thorough.

The only criticism I have, is that the PayPal payment page makes it very hard to figure out how to pay with major credit cards. The most obvious part of the payment page is the PayPal login box. It’s only when you notice a small image of credit cards and a Continue link that users realize you don’t have to log in to pay with a credit card.

Google Checkout

http://www.google.com/checkout/

In the past few years, Google has jumped into the online payment market with its service, Google Checkout. This service uses Buy Now buttons to process payments through any web site.

To use Google Checkout, you’ll need a Google account, then use their service to verify your bank account details. The validation process is similar to PayPal’s: Google deposits a small amount of money to your account, then you tell Google how much they deposited.

To create a Buy Now button, log in to Google Checkout and select the Tools tab across the top, then the Buy Now buttons link on the left or center of the page. From here, it’s easy to generate button code you can copy and paste into your web pages.

When your site visitors click your Google Checkout Buy Now button, they’ll be taken to a simple web page at Google that lets them enter their payment details. This is much more direct and obvious than PayPal’s initial payment screen.

Google Checkout currently charges 2% of each sale amount plus 20 cents (USD). If you use Google AdWords and link it with your Google Checkout account, you can receive free transaction processing in some cases. Google does hold back a reserve amount to handle chargebacks if they believe you have an excessive number. Buyers also have the chance to provide a customer review. You can respond to the review if it’s negative, but Google will remove a review only if it’s hate speech or not constructive.

Support for Google Checkout is primarily through help pages and forums, which are quite extensive and amazingly thorough. However, it took me a while to find the Contact Support page for Google Checkout, as it’s not clearly linked from their Merchant Help Center. Nor does it appear there’s telephone support. These are significant issues, considering most online payment processors have phone numbers and support forms clearly visible.

Google Checkout also can be used as a payment processor in shopping carts you host yourself. When used as a payment processor through a full-featured shopping cart, the buyer can store their payment details once with Google and won’t have to enter their data at your site.