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How to Pick a Shopping Cart: 7 Carts Reviewed
Mal’s e-commerce
Another shopping cart that lets you create buttons and handle processing remotely is Mal’s e-commerce, a 10-year-old company based in Spain. Mal’s provides a lot of functionality in a simple, easy-to-use service. They offer both free and paid Premium carts, depending upon what features you need. And there’s software you can download to manage your orders processed through their service from your desktop.
To use Mal’s you need to set up an account. On their main account page, you’ll see a Cart Setup tab. Click that tab to open a page that provides links to define your products, payment methods, and cart behavior. You can, for example, add your logo on the payment pages your customers will use. Like PayPal and Google Checkout, it’s fairly easy to set up different options.
Mal’s offers a fairly robust set of features for a simple cart. You can implement discounts, email notifications, shipping methods and costs, downloadable products, gift vouchers, and other features. They also have a broad range of payment process from different parts of the world.
The cost for Mal’s? Free. Their service depends on heavy users who pay for the Premium service, in turn funding the free carts. So there are no costs per transaction, monthly fees or setup charges.
Support for Mal’s e-commerce is primarily through an extensive set of documentation that is well written and task-oriented. You can email them, but they ask that you use the help text and the forums first as most questions are answered there.
Regular Shopping Carts
If your online business is a new one or an extension of an existing business, chances are good that a regular shopping cart is required. You’ll want to let a third party manage product quantities, discounts, stock sell-outs, orders, shipping, and all the rest.
In addition to having the option of a regular cart or a more complex cart, you also may install and host the cart yourself, or use a third-party service. Installation on your own server gives you ultimate control but you’re also responsible for securing the database, upgrading the software, and all the other maintenance tasks.
Third-party services solve those problems but introduce others. For example, a client of mine uses Network Solutions, but it costs too much, the interface is quirky, and pages load very slowly at times. However, my client is prepared to put up with this to avoid the hassle and responsibility of installing and maintaining a shopping cart on their server.
Hosting a Shopping Cart on Your Own Server
The two regular carts we’ll look at are Zen Cart and digiShop. Zen Cart is free and open source, while digiSHOP is from a private software company. They offer similar capabilities but can be quite different in actual use.
Zen Cart
The first install-it-yourself shopping cart you might look at is Zen Cart, an open source cart that’s an offshoot of osCommerce, a PHP-powered cart that was once popular but has since suffered, partly due to its convoluted code base). In my experience, Zen Cart (and osCommerce) benefit from the same strengths, for example, a strong online community and lots of modules to extend the shopping cart functionality. However, they also share the same weaknesses, namely too much code to wade through to make changes to templates.
Installing Zen Cart is fairly easy. You upload their files to your server, set up a database, and visit the installation page in a web browser.
Once Zen Cart is installed, the administration area makes it fairly easy to create products and categories. The installation process also lets you load the database with sample data, so that you can become comfortable with the cart as you load in your own products.
Creating templates is somewhat more complicated. There are a handful of templates that can be changed to reflect your page design. However, editing a template requires carefully maintaining PHP code. It’s fairly easy to break if you’re not sure of what you’re doing. And, like most carts, there are dozens of templates that control the center content area of the cart—the elements that make up product listings or details.
Support for Zen Cart can be found on their forums, a wiki, and tutorials. I’ve had great results when I’ve used these support tools.
The price of Zen Cart software is free. However, as with any software you install yourself, you will pay—either for your time to set up and configure, or from an expert in HTML, CSS, and PHP.
digiSHOP
http://digishop.sumeffect.com/
The digiSHOP cart is the best software I have found for less than a thousand dollars (USD). While there are other carts in this price range (and more expensive carts), digiSHOP is fairly easy to use and, therefore, is a good cart to discuss and compare with other carts.
Like Zen Cart, installing digiSHOP is relatively easy. You upload your files and set up a database with a database username and password. Then you open your browser, call up their installation web page, and follow directions. You even can avoid the hassle of installation by hiring them for $45 (USD) to do the installation for you on your server.
Once installed, digiSHOP is fairly simple to use. Creating products is simple: click the Products tab then the Add a Product button. You can easily add variants for your products or a couple types of descriptions, for example, a short blurb and a full description.
digiSHOP also integrates with a number of payment processors, as well as affiliate programs. There’s also the ability to integrate with QuickBooks, Stone Edge, Google Analytics, and eBay. And digiSHOP also integrates with the company’s other products, for example, chatFUSE for live chat and fireBLAST for email marketing.
Adding your page design to digiSHOP should be trouble-free. There are two sets of header and footer templates—a set used for secure pages and another set for pages delivered without an SSL certificate. Using your page design, copy and paste some small bits of PHP code that digiSHOP provides, then upload the four files to the templates folder. If you need to modify the design of the functional areas of the carts, their template file names are obvious enough. digiSHOP also provides an online widget that will do the conversion from your page design to their templates.
What I appreciate most about digiSHOP is that its file structure and code are very clean and easy to understand. This makes maintenance more manageable, for example, to find and tweak templates.
Support for digiSHOP is relatively quick and at the right level of detail. They have an online knowledge base which is helpful. But the best support has been through email.
Costs for digiSHOP vary depending on which version of their software you buy. If you don’t need many features, their standard version works fine for $299 (USD). The two versions with more features cost $349 (USD) and $799 (USD).