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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jan 2002
    Location
    Fort Worth, Texas
    Posts
    14

    Question Shopping Carts, Shopping Cart Services and Shopping Cart Software?

    I'm fairly familiar with OS Commerce and a few other similar carts. However I'm looking for the easiest most cost effective way to get a site online and selling.

    A few details:
    We will be selling physical goods.
    We will be operating multiple sites in multiple niches.
    Search engine friendly URLs are important to me.
    Ease of uploading product is important.
    Multiple design templates are important.
    We will be operating both wholesale and retail site so the ability to have the customer purchase via cc, check and/or purchase order (Net Terms) is very important.

    Please give your thoughts and any other suggestions you may have.

    Thank in advance for you help.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Location
    Middle England
    Posts
    918
    Your requirements list is easily attainable from any decent cart system out of the box without any need for mods or plugins.

    I'll throw in www.jshop.co.uk for you to have a look at:

    We will be selling physical goods
    - no issues here

    We will be operating multiple sites in multiple niches.
    - again no problem, look into the developer licence that allows you to create unlimited sites with the licence

    Search engine friendly URLs are important to me
    - SE freindly URL's available, you can also configure them

    Ease of uploading product is important
    - upload directly via the control panel or import via text file/CSV

    Multiple design templates are important
    - you can create as many different templates as you want. For example you could have different category or product templates depending on the display/layout/style you wanted.

    We will be operating both wholesale and retail site so the ability to have the customer purchase via cc, check and/or purchase order (Net Terms) is very important.
    - you can add as many purchasing methods as you want

    Jshop is not the only one, have a loot at PinnacleCart and Viart as well.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jan 2002
    Location
    Fort Worth, Texas
    Posts
    14

    Thanks

    Thanks for the info! I really appreciate it.

    After further review I think I would prefer a hosted solution for now.

    This would allow me to put my efforts toward marketing etc rather than worrying about in depth design, security, payment processing etc etc.

    I know I would grow out of this, however IMHO in will be the quickest easiest way to get started. Also, it will allow more time to research the long term solution and get what I really want long term while still having a store in the short term.

    Any suggestions?

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Location
    Middle England
    Posts
    918
    Ah you want a hosted solution? I don't really know enough about hosted carts except that you are resytricted to whatever the provider gives you.

  5. #5
    Hello,

    we use snscart they are very user friendly and easy to use and manage. Try them out, we install them on a lot of our clients website and all of them are very satisfied with it. =)

  6. #6
    I wrote a post one time about the value of a good pay cart vs. a free cart. I'm not against open source by any means, but if you find a cart that is specifically well built to deliver your product or service (aka if you implement it properly it can increase your sales) -- it is usually worth far more than any setup fee or monthly fee associated with a pay cart. If you search the forum I'm sure you can find that post.

    If you want a very cost effective pay cart, many of my clients have done well with mals e-commerce: www.mals-e.com

    Another good option is Canada Cart - www.canadacart.ca

    I'll also mention Active Checkout, because they have provided amazing support for my clients. I actually got in touch with them through this forum last year. www.activecheckout.ca

    Hope that helps!
    David Goodale
    Merchant Accounts.ca
    Canada's merchant account provider.
    Toll free: (888) 414-7111 ext. 5 | Direct: (905) 901-2254

  7. #7
    We currently use King Cart which is a very reasonably priced hosted shopping cart. You can create your own look and feel if you know some HTML either by hand or using Dreamweaver or similar tool. I designed our cart to match our web site and it worked very well.

    We have grown and will soon change to a different cart but we've been more than happy with King Cart as an inexpensive hosted cart for our small business.

    Regards,
    Stephanie
    Products4Pets

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Location
    Your Screen
    Posts
    3,999
    There's always Mal's E-Commerce. You design the HTML website however you want, then just plug in Mal's shopping cart code... Mal takes care of the checkout process.

    I've been using his free service on various niche sites for 7 years now, it's been very reliable, works great, and yes it really is free.

    If you want to plug it in to your gateway and get a ton of other handy features, that's $8/month, even less if you pre-pay for a year.

    What I love about Mal's system is that I can design my website in basic HTML, exactly how I want it... I'm not restricted by templates, alien coding and what-not. I can whip out an HTML site in Dreamweaver, hook up the Mal's code, and I'm live. The last niche site I put up using Mal's E-Comm, I built start-to-finish in 3 hours.

    Bailey
    Let's Connect on Twitter! @thatsmsgeek2u || Fighting mediocrity one thread at a time.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    Nashville, TN
    Posts
    237
    We're in a similar situation. I'm fairly familiar with osCommerce, and it's a hunk of crap. I mean it works great, until you have to look at the code or do anything on the backend. It's just a disaster from the ground up.

    We want to select a shopping cart to standardize on for all of our clients who ask us to do development work and deliver a shopping cart solution. I know one product will not fit every client, but one should come close for most. Here is what is important to us:

    1) Extensibility (either full source code or well documented API's)
    2) Solid user base (online forums, mailing list, etc.; many implementations)
    3) Collection of user contributed modules
    4) Multi-domain support a plus

    It can be a free or paid solution, but it cannot be a hosted solution.

    Does anyone have any suggestions?

  10. #10
    Try out www.zencart.com. An offshoot of osCommerce but cleaner code and more actively maintained. Very busy user forums.
    ------------
    Tim

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Amidst several dimensions
    Posts
    4,324
    oscommerce on top of any small shared web hosting account. domain in your own account at a respectable registrar. youll be able to jump hosts as your needs increase up to dedicated. oscommerce code is mingled with html code, however its still the most widely supported ecommerce script with the most modules.

  12. #12
    www.pinnaclecart.com

    Has all of that plus more. The URL's for SEO are fantastic and the wholesale function works well.

  13. #13
    For free carts we preferred ZenCart but was a pain in the butt to upgrade and preserve changes etc. along the way. Finally gave up and are now using and selling X-cart which is a good solution to us and our customers so far. It is much easier to customize and has a wide array of plug in payment gateways.

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Ottawa
    Posts
    1
    There's also Shopify.

    Hosted, free trial account, monthly fees.

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