It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve come back from the dark side (working for someone else) and should have more time to post here.
Any how, one of my last assignments at my J-O-B was to implement a new shopping cart. My new parent companies cart was over 9 years old and never updated, very old school and not all SEO friendly. I had some experience with Pinnacle Cart, they offer both a hosted and licensed version
of their software. The licensed version will set you back about $800 plus the cost of hosting on your own server. Pinnacle cart will host your site with their software installed with prices ranging from $29.95 to $149.95. When I used Pinnacle Cart we chose the hosted version and it worked out ok. Technical support was fair and we had no downtime issues. I found customizing the site challenging but not impossible for someone who has intermediate web design skills. Pinnacle Cart does offer a free 14 day trial.
I did sign up for a free trial at Bigcommerce but unfortunately I did not have much time to explore their service thoroughly. BigCommerce claims they make it easy to sell online. You get a website, shopping cart, SEO, design, hosting and more. Try it for free!
The two shopping carts I focused on were 3dcart and CoreCommerce. 3dcart has a nice cart but a few nasty reviews online. The reviews did not deter me, ultimately at the time I was ready to make my decision Corecommerce already had Facebook and mobile phone store capabilities. I was looking to start using those features right away. 3dcart does offer api access at any account level which is a plus. Most every other cart with api access requires either a one time fee or paying at least $99 a month for a higher tiered service plan.
I found Corecommerce easy to work with and technical support was available each time I needed help. I chose the chat option but they offer email and phone support as well. Customizing your website is not terribly difficult but can be challenging. They do offer a wide range of templates and we found one that suited our needs. No sense spending too much time on your design in my opinion. Make the site look decent and concentrate on SEO and marketing. You can always change the design at a later date. A great looking site is useless if no one can find you in Google search results. Speaking of Google, Corecommerce can export your products directly to Google base, a must for any online retailer.
We imported much of our product data into Corecommerce. It is possible to include image imports if you copy all the images into a directory (another Corecommerce perk, they offer FTP access) and include the image paths in your product import file. The product interface is easy to use and all the standard SEO options are available. One of the nicest features is the separate tab for your mobile phone accessible site. You can use a custom thumbnail image and description. I did not have the opportunity to use the Facebook app but you can export products to Facebook which is a popular trend at the moment. CoreCommerce offers a free 15 Day Free Trial. No credit card is required.
One last note about shopping carts and you get what you pay for. I used Magento on a site for about 10 months. Magento is free open source software. I liked Magento but there is no true support besides posting in their forum or pay $8000 for the enterprise edition. So if your site breaks, your out of luck unless you have a Magento expert you can pay for assistance. I used a Magento recommended host for $24.95 a month, Nexcess.net (a U.S. based host). They were a great host and had awesome technical support. But I had some issues with Magento like Google base exports not working and spent many hours reading their forum and trying fixes. For under $50 a month you can use a service like Corecommerce and get a web template, mobile phone site, facebook product app and technical support as needed. If you’re serious about sales, spend the few extra dollars!
