I'm doing some competitive analysis...

Anyone using an e-commerce solution they can't believe they were lucky
enough to find? What about a not-so-good solution?

I'd appreciate your feedback :-)

Kind Regards,

--
Penny Ortega
Toll-free Customer Support: (877) lalaweb [525-2932]
Toll-free Tech Support: (800) 366-2234
Direct: (514) 866-6199
penny@lalaweb.com
http://www.lalaweb.com

This is speaking from a web designer point of view and won't necessarily be of interest to web hosts, but I stumbled upon a great free e-commerce system for small businesses.

It's Mal's E-Commerce at
http://www.mals-e.com

Here one can get a free, secure shopping cart system. The site will not do your online payments for you, but you can link your account directly to a payment gateway like AuthorizeNet or Cybercash, or even Paypal. But most small business people with storefronts who already have a plain merchant account can set it up so they can lookup and printout the orders placed at their sites securely via their browser.

The shopping cart can work in any currency and in over a dozen languages.

Small business people with little experience and only a handful of items will find this a great solution, because the tags/icons that say "Add to Cart" are easily integrated into one's site. When a visitor clicks on it, they are transported to a secure site at "aitsafe.com". The system comes with complete shipping and tax options, email confirmations and more. And the store owner doesn't have to buy a Certificate.

And all Mal's E-Commerce requires is a tiny graphic at the bottom of the cart pages - no ads, no ad banners, nothing. It only makes money from those who opt to pay the $5 for a Premium account. With all they give away for free, there has grown a great sense of loyalty amongst its users.

I'm recommending Mal's to a client from France who needs a shopping cart in French. I'll having some who speaks French design the site, that's the easy part. Finding a shopping cart that's in French was the problem. There are very FEW places you can go where the actual shopping cart checkout screens are in another language, let alone French, let me tell you!

And I have one new design client, referred by someone else, who is hosting on a competitor's NT server. By using Mal's I will help this client sell items from their site and avoid costly e-commerce options at that host.

I'm familiar with Perl shopping cart systems and those that come with some webhosts like A La Cart from Alabanza and M-Cart from Aitcom.Net. I was disappointed A La Cart doesn't allow you to integrate your own HTML header and footer files into the system like M-Cart does. This allows much closer, seamless integration into one's site design. Because A La Cart only allows you to set a backround color or image and add a logo, this prevents you from integrating your full navigation scheme into the system. I believe A La Cart is put at a disadvantage because of this.

These more developed shopping carts that generate pages dynamically from a database are good for clients with a better aptitude for computers and have enough items to sell (20, 30 or more) that require categorization.

I have one client (animationimages.com) running an online art gallery using M-Cart and has over 100 posters/cels all categorized and for sale. He scans and loads his own images and updates the cart's admin area. Does very well for himself.

Sorry for rambling. It's almost 2am here and I've still got work to do ...

Hope it was helpful.

ttfn

Sean

Mals Shopping cart may be nice, but it is incredibly insecure. It uses prices embedded in the HTML which leaves it open to manipulation. This means you have to check every item of every order - a pain with a lot of orders. To see what mean, add an item from their test store, then change the price in the URL and hit enter. It adds it again with the new price you entered. I advise avoiding carts like this.

We've been doing some work with agoracgi (http://www.agoracgi.com) over the past couple of days. Not as easy to set up as some scripts, but it does have some nice functionality in it.

Yes, check out http://merchantcommerce.net/

I use mals-e.com too, I have several hundred items for sale on my retail gift shop website, and have received over 300 orders using their services in the past four months.

To date I've not had anyone change the price on any items... and mal's system has worked beautifully for me. The price is sure right, especially for the simplicity of use and reliability of service!!!

There are such huge holes in so many cgi carts that I avoid them like the plague. I am not a cgi programmer so I have no way of inspecting a script and understanding its intricacies to know if, and exactly what, problems may exist with its processing or posting. I have no way of telling if a cgi has opened a back door the size of the empire state building or left my server open to every script kiddie's exploit.

So I don't install cgi carts. I use Mal's system, and, to date have been extremely pleased with it, regardless of the web-based drawbacks which may exist. To date those drawbacks haven't created one iota of trouble from here...

:) Of course ~~ YMMV ~~


:D Bailey

It looks like a spammer resurected this thread, but as long as it's here...

Has anyone tried CoolCart (http://www.coolcart.com)? It's not free, but it looks pretty simple for someone with no programming skills.