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!

I also found a 10% off coupon code “NOVEMBER” so 2 years cost $94 or about the price of a 500gb external hard drive

I hope Mozy works out better than Omnidrive, I paid for that service last year and now they are out of business, no contacting their customers about closing down and who knows what happened to my data.

If you’re like me and backing up data due to a hard drive crash. You did not back up for over a year and want more than one solution to backing up data or priceless pictures and video, have a look at Crashplan. Mozy seems ok so far but I imagine that retrieving the data would be a slow process as well. With the software from Crashplan you can automatically back up your data to an external hard drive connected to another computer on your network or even a friend’s house. I started using Crashplan before Time Machine was released for the MAC. I actually back up the data to 2 separate drives connected to 2 other PC’s on my network. Crashplan works on all operating systems so my Mac backs up files onto my Windows PC.

Since I’m so paranoid about data loss I do use Time Machine as well to do backups to an external drive bay I’ve had for years. About once a week I boot up the drive bay (It’s kind of loud) and use Time Machine to make a back up.

What have we learned here (probably not much, hahaha) is that extremely paranoid about crashing hard drives. If you want your data safe, use more than one backup solution. Sure you have to shell out a little cash but if you ever had a drive crash and use an “engineer” to try an extract the lost data, you could end up paying $1000 or more. I think the cheapest quote I received for extracting data from a bad drive was $650 and there is no guarantee they can extract the data from a crashed drive. A service like Mozy, Crashplan and an external drive will cost you about $200 to start with a recurring fee for Mozy.

I almost forgot, it never hurts to back up photos and video to DVD’s for safe keeping too!

Mozy Online Backup. 2GB Free or $4.95/mo for Unlimited Backup. It’s simple, automatic and secure!

Mozy is the only free, full-featured remote backup service.

Just released, the MozyPro for Mac beta for business
Backup unity in the workplace is now possible.

* Fully-integrated Admin Console for Mac users
* Server and network drive support
* 24×7 phone support
* Online access to 30-day file versioning
* Sleek and professional Mac styling

Or MozyHome for your Mac
* Download & Install the MozyHome client
* Select the files to back up
* Let MozyHome for Mac do the rest

I have a client that runs a small poetry magazine and they receive about 200 hits a day. They have been using PowWeb for 5 years now and we have experienced very little downtime, none that I can remember in the past few years. They pay $7.77 a month but at the time of this post they are offering a deal – 1,500 GB + 15,000 GB xfer – *On Sale* $3.88/month!

I’ve used Godaddy for years and have never experienced any issues. If your new to buying domain names then I highly recommend trying Godaddy.

Be careful during the checkout process, they will try to sell you services like private registration (not a bad thing) and web hosting. I’ve read mixed reviews about Godaddy hosting but if this is your first site and you plan on designing it yourself then you might consider grabbing discounted hosting. You can always move your site later. Just don’t commit to 1 year of hosting. I recommend paying month to month until you feel like their hosting is reliable and customer service is quick to respond to issues.