Shopping Carts
In order to display and keep a database of products clients, You need a shopping cart. A shopping cart is simply a software script that allows you to keep control of your inventory and website and allows your clients to brows and order from your e-commerce store. Their are many, probably thousands of different shopping carts available today. I will go over a few of the best in my opinion to help you decide on the e-commerce solutions that are right for you.
Volusion ( website )
Volusion is quite possibly the best all around cart on the market today. The volusion shopping cart is very well designed from both an e commerce and internet marketing standpoint. With features like affiliate tracking, one page checkout, cross selling, email newsletters and many more features. Their is not much this cart can not do. If you have the premium version, it will seamlessly integrate with quickbooks, endicia for shipping as well as allow you to download xml spreed sheets of your products database so you can upload them to popular shopping feeds such as shopping.com, pricegrabber and froogle. The volusion website itself s very customizable. basically any design can be implemented into this website. A nice feature about volusion is it comes with about 50 nice template designs, so if you are not able to design your own site or your can not afford to shell out a grand for a web design firm to create a website for you, you can still run a nice looking website. Aside from the shopping cart itself, volusion has one of the best customer service and support teams in the industry. A e-commerce website is a mission critical operation. You can not afford to be sporadically down at times. On top of the functionality of the shopping cart, volusion give you peace of mind that your site will be up all the time.
Zoovy (website )
Zoovy is another very nicely designed shopping cart system. It actually has the ability to surpass volusion in my personal opinion. Zoovy integrates with what seems like everything imaginable, quickbooks, froogle, shopping.com ebay, etc. as far as marketing goes, the site has some great features, email marketing, SEO urls, customer tracking, etc. I have only used this cart with one client and it was by far the best experience i have ever had in my e-commerce life. The site allows for complete customization and if you cant create a website, the zoovy team will. This is the only downfall of zoovy, The pricing structure. Zoovy's pricing is best for a medium sized business. it cost $3,000 to setup plus 1.49% of your gross monthly sales, whereas volusion cost between $27 and $197 per month depending on the amount of products plus $100 setup.For any small business, the setup fee just may be to much for their budget and for any large business the 1.49% of your gross monthly sales can add up quickly when you are doing $70,000 to $100,000+ in sales per month. However i do highly recommend this cart for those e-commerce business's who are averaging between $20,000 and $30,000 per month in sales volume.
Magento ( website ) This cart is not reccoemnded for live stores!
I am very partial on this shopping cart. It has many problems and flaws that have yet to be fixed but as an open source (meaning its free and anyone can change the code) it has great potential. I really do not recommend this cart to anyone who is serious about this web store, i would just like to point this out up front. The shopping cart loads very slowly and requires a more expensive web host that can handle the load. Adding products is quite a daunting task, their product setup page is very oddly designed, any one with a lot of products is sure to go insane with this solution. However their are many upside to the cart, it is very aesthetically pleasing,it has the look and feel of a high priced shopping cart, their are many extra addon's available due to the fact its open and did i mention it was free? This shopping cart is fine if you have 30 products and don't expect to make a whole lot in sales each month. If you just making a websotre for fun, i would recommend this cart for you. However like i said, in no way should any type of mission critical store be using this shopping cart at this time.
I hoped this little shopping cart review helped you out a bit in your descisions. I have personally used all 3 and would reccomend them all to anyone (with the exception of magento). If you would like to know more about me or me experience in the eccomerce field, please visit the about me page.