How to Pick a Shopping Cart: 7 Carts Reviewed

Using a Hosted Third-party Shopping Cart

If you’d like to avoid the bother or risk to install and maintain a shopping cart on your web server, the other option is to use a hosted service. With a hosted cart, you can use your own page design and URL.Network Solutions

Network Solutions Ecommerce

http://ecommerce.networksolutions.com/

Network Solutions E-commerce provides a broad range of cart functionality, for example, the ability to handle variants and map quantities to each type of variant. If you sell a shirt in three sizes, you can set prices for each size shirt and track quantities as they’re sold.

To set up your page design in Network Solutions E-commerce, click on the Design tab in the control panel, where you can add a header and footer. The Layout options are primarily settings that you define for your cart overall, for example, color schemes.

The Network Solutions E-commerce cart comes with a variety of buttons used through the checkout process. You can add your own set if you sign up for their Pro package.

Adding products is done through the Inventory link. The Products option makes it fairly easy to add details about each product, including variants, images, and other details. Tracking inventory, price discounts, gift certificates, and other product-related details are also available within the Inventory options.

There are a lot of online tutorials to help with setting up your cart in Network Solutions E-commerce. Their telephone support also has been excellent, especially at odd hours like weekends and public holidays.

Prices for Network Solutions E-commerce are $49.99 per month (USD) and $99.99 per month (USD). The higher price lets you use your own interface design.

CoreCommerce

http://www.corecommerce.com/

If you like the digiSHOP cart but do not want the bother of hosting a shopping cart, CoreCommerce.com is the hosted version of digiSHOP, with extra features. It also makes a good alternative to consider with Network Solutions E-commercet. Because CoreCommerce is the digiSHOP Pro version offered as a hosted service, setting up products and performing other tasks are identical to digiSHOP.

Adding your site design to CoreCommerce is just as easy adding it to their stand-alone digiSHOP software. You create header and footer pages from your page design, paste a few bits of code, then copy the templates to their server. For the content areas of the cart, you’re limited to using CSS to style the checkout form and other bits that appear in a shopping cart page. Unlike a stand-alone cart, you can’t go in and tweak the code for the signup form or other page elements.

With regular shopping carts, it’s critical to test how easy or difficult it is to add your web site design to cart pages. It’s fairly effortless with digiSHOP software to accomplish. Templates typically divide into two groups—one set for layout of the cart web page, and one set for individual elements of the cart pages, for example, the login screen or payment detail form.

Prices for CoreCommerce run from $39.95 per month (USD) to $99.95 per month (USD). The higher price adds more bandwidth and server storage space.

Custom-developed Shopping Carts

Beyond regular shopping carts are custom-developed shopping carts. These carts are either created from scratch by a programmer who then sells their cart to their client base, or are customized, based upon an existing cart like Magento.

My recommendation is to work through feature lists, and carefully research and analyze your needs, before you tackle custom-developed shopping carts. The features you need may be present on carts that already exist. Beware of a situation where a small compromise on your part commits you to considerable expense.

Then, if you still can’t find what you need off the shelf, proceed carefully. Seek solid references for the programmer or agency that will create your shopping cart. When you talk to referees, be sure to ask how the programmer handled changes: did they get snippy and rude, or did they insist that the client clearly describe what was needed?

Also, you should require the code for your cart to be thoroughly documented. That will make it easier for you to take your cart to another programmer or agency, should you need to.

Finally, with custom carts, it’s important that software development happens in a structured way. Your requirements, for example, should be written down and all questions and testing should refer to back to these. The programmer should set up a test bed where the cart can be built and tested without affecting any live production. You also should confirm that the programmer or agency uses tools to store the code, keeps track of any changes to the code, and helps maintain code over time.

These are all basic software programming practices, but you should still ask. A no to any of these questions, or I don’t need a public test bed, or We don’t document our code are signs that you should go elsewhere.

Search Optimization and Shopping Carts

Whatever cart you choose, optimizing your online store for search engines is critical. With simple carts like PayPal, Google Checkout, and Mal’s, you must optimize the pages on your website: they handle only the payment processing. With regular shopping carts, however, you should have, at the least, the ability to:

• oversee the HTML page title, as well as the page title that appears within the content on the page.
• control at least the URL filename for each of your product catalog and detail pages, and, ideally, the file folder path to that filename.
• modify meta tags, image title and alt attributes, and the words used within your links.

I would argue that the ability to output your shopping site as a site map, and then submit and upload through Google’s Webmaster Tools, is also key for search optimization. And some carts let you export your products as a list for shopping comparison sites.

One approach that I’ve used for search optimization is to publish product catalog and detail pages as static web pages. This gives my clients 100% control of what’s on every single page. They let their shopping cart manage the orders and payments. Other clients let the shopping cart do everything. Both groups do well, so I assume what works is a matter of your personal preference.

Some Final Thoughts on Shopping Carts

Hopefully this article has managed to avoid a flame war about who creates the best shopping cart. It really depends on your needs and preferences. Here are a few quick issues to also consider when you pick a shopping cart:

• Check which control panel your hosting company uses, if using an install-it-yourself shopping cart. Some web hosts’ control panels, such as Plesk, treat secure and non-secure pages separately, so installing and configuring your cart may require a few extra steps.
• Develop a backup plan for your orders, customer list, templates, and settings. Backing up is never a bad idea!
• Look up online web site monitoring services that will periodically check your online store, and email or text you when your site is down.
• Avoid storing credit card data in your cart database for better your security.
• Make sure you look into chargeback policies and costs if you use Mal’s, Google Checkout, or PayPal.

Finally, some hosted carts offer McAfee Secure or similar services to ensure that an online store is secure. This clearly is a preference issue. My view is that it’s good if it helps your customers feel comfortable enough to buy. These services also pinpoint any security issues before you find them the hard way.