Shopping Cart Recommendations

[Clueless]

Hi everyone, this is my first time here. I hope I have this post in the right place. I have spent hours looking for a good shopping cart. Does anyone have any suggestions. I did find one but I can't find any feedback about it. It is called Shopping Cart System v2.0. I don't plan to take cc for awhile and I realize my sales will be slow but just finding a good software or site that has a good cart is my main concern at this point. I think it should also have some security even for their mailing address. Or is that necessary. Privacy is a big factor these days so it couldn't hurt. Thanks for your help.
I am Clueless :D

[akashik]

As far as shopping carts go I don't think you'll find too much better than The Exchange Project for the price (free)
http://www.theexchangeproject.com

It's designed to be used under SSH so data is fairly safe. It doesn't store credit information on the server so that nails down that problem. Works with several merchant facilities and has a huge support area on their site.

Akopia is recommended by the people that can get it to work, but they seem to be in the minority

Greg Moore

[Jaiem]

Dansie is a pretty simple to use cart with a lot of features you can configure, or just turn off. Good security too.

[akashik]

Originally posted by Jaiem
Dansie is a pretty simple to use cart with a lot of features you can configure, or just turn off. Good security too.

Didn't that software have a backdoor in it people were concerned about? I would presume it would have been closed off by now if that was the case of course.. just curious.

Greg Moore

[Jaiem]

That was supposedly a support mechanism for Dansie (and remored to let them shut down carts that haven't paid for licensing).

Don't know how it turned out but it's still a good product. Haven't heard of any problems because of it.

[telecomps]

The company I use for web hosting provides a free Miva Merchant shopping cart. I've loved it, easy to set up and use, keeps track of inventory, e-mails you when your stock is low. Also has an affiliate program built into it if you're interested in something like that. If you are curious as to how the shopping cart looks and works, check out, * * * DELETED * * * of course you can set it up differently if you want. Also the webhost company that provides this for only $30 a month is * * * DELETED * * *.

Moderator's Comments: No self promotion posts.

[JTY]

The address for the exchange project is http://www.theexchangeproject.org/

[asm]

try to look at http://www.softwareforhosting.com/HSP
may be it'll be good enough for you :)

[structure]

hello,

we use Miva merchant. We think it's one of the better and more popular shopping cart product. You can take a look at our site www.treasurebuzz.com for example.

Thanks

[jimitpatadiya]

http://www.softwareforhosting.com/HSP

is having lots of errors in their demo section.

i found wrong mysql query error in user demo and template file missing error on admin demo section.

Poor!!!

[portalplanet]

Check out oscommerce. http://www.oscommerce.com/.

Justin
:idea:

[Patrick_76]

Moderator's Comments: No self-promotion!

[Jaiem]

IMO you really need to first identify what you want the system tp do.

IOW, do you want a full account based ordering system (ie. require your customers to setup an account to make a purchase like on Amazon), or, do you just want an order-by-order system (ie. a system that takes order but doesn't keep an account per customer).

The former is great for repeat business but the latter is much easier for first-time buyers. Yes, we all want repeat business. But depending what your site sells you may have much more 1-time or infrequent buyers than a cadre of steady regular customers.

[ice]

I suggust you to check www.ikobo.com (http://www.ikobo.com) .It offers shopping cart facility and credit card processing. You can integrate these in your website easily and seamless and its rates are lower than other companies. Its transaction speed is fast. iKobo automatically encrypts your confidential information using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol with an encryption key length of 128 bits (the highest level commercially available). Your customers never share their private financial information (e.g. credit card or bank account numbers) during the transaction, so they can complete payment while retaining security. I have used it for one year.I am satisfied with it!

[adrianpearson]

Hi,

My personal fav is ekmpowershop (www.ekmpowershop.com (http://www.ekmpowershop.com)) but you can find a list of many of these type of online store builder systems at...

HotScripts (http://www.hotscripts.com/Remotely_Hosted/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/)

Hope this helps.

[john2004]

On my opinion, it's a good decision to use unexpensive carts such as ExtCart Shopping Cart Software (http://www.ext-cart.com) , ShopFactory (http://ShopFactory.com) , 3DCart (http://3DCart.com) etc. You can find more unexpensive shopping carts using Google, yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_E...Shopping_Carts/) or visiting special sites as http://www.onlyphp.com/browse-22.html.

If you familiar with PHP I would recommend using Oscommerce shopping cart. Because there are no support except support from community and if you need adjust something you need to do yourself.

John

[greys]

Halo there….
I’ll recommend you b2bparadise. It has easy to use options with secured tools. Just check it out if it works. u can talk to them urself at(877)-269-0196 . And I agree with you that privacy and security are the biggest concern nowadays for every business entity. and if its ur concern too…it’s a reasonable one.







for features:b2bparadise.com/features.jsp

[lets]

Somewhat unrelated, but as a user of Dansie you should know ..........

Customers in my survey insist that as well as the check-out page taking their credit card info, the page requesting shipping/billing info should also be a secure (https) page.

To do this HOST VARIABLE #1 in the vars.dat file needs to be set to an https URL.

With this vars setting, the page displaying the shopping basket also becomes a secure page. The PROBLEM, is that with the browsers Netscape and FoxFire, clicking the "Continue Shopping" button activates a nasty pop-up warning of a security risk. Although this is a moot point, as there's no sensitive information on the page, it IS scaring away customers.

I've been discussing this with the programs author, and while he agrees this could be an "issue", so far he is unable or unwilling to devise a "work around" that would maintain the current functionality of the shopping cart.

Oh! If anyone knows a way to "fix" this PLEASE let me know.

[etechsupport]

I think you should go with Zencart or cubecart, both are good as per your need. However cubecart v2 is easy to set up, if you need extra features you can choose cubecart v3.

[ae3799t]

Of All Internet Business Software, the Shopping Cart is arguably the most critical. Unfortunately, I do not believe there is an easy solution for everyone. There are tons of carts out there and it's almost impossible to make a good evaluation about them. The reasons are many. Too much self hype, differences in personal skills, available finances, differences in size of business, differences in type of business products, whether you use your cart to build your web pages or just to handle the sales, differences in supporting host, etc. In addition, there are problems that are not issues in the beginning, but can really escalate as your business grows. And there are issues that remain undercover and lift their ugly head weeks or even months down the road.

Here is my experience. When I started 2 years ago, I choose my cart because the Credit Card processor I choose told me it was a free cart that came with their service. (the cart was ez-powercart from the Oakland Group which I do not recommend). I basically had to go into the cart control panel and click on "add product" and enter all my product data as you would have to do in most carts. The cart was easy to set-up and I thought I had a very good shopping cart. The first thing I realized was that I could not process credit cards with the free cart, so I decided to pay the $20/mn for the next cart up. Again, I thought I had a great cart. In all honesty this worked fine while I was struggling to get products out on my website. But.. Once I had the basic website set-up and running well and was calling my cart from the product pages, I started to run into problems with limitations. For example, the cart didn't have a way to add suggested products (20 to 30% of your business) when someone ordered something, it did not send the customer an email with the tracking number when you shipped, The cart itself had a very tiny link "back to shopping" which people missed. And ez-powercart did not allow you to change unless you paid an extra $10 a month fee. They added a yearly extra charge for who knows what purpose, Shipping was a problem. As someone in the forum said, they needed a way to add fixed amount to each product. I decided to download all my product information and they did not allow that (basically making it harder to switch to another cart. It got worse as time went on and my business hit $200,000 in sales. Support rarely helped solve a problem, but instead seemed to be Bull crapping their way with long tedious answers as to why they were incompetent to solve the problem and how it was someone else's fault. For example I found my customers at AOL and other providers were NOT getting their email confirmation. Their support said it was do to AOL blocking their server do to spam and they could not do anything about it. However, I called AOL and they said it was because they did not have reverse DNS set-up. I checked this and sure enough their was no PTR record in one of the records. I sent them an email and got back another BS answer making me believe these guys were totally incompetent. Making a long story short, 2 years have passed and I am still stuck with this cart. It's my busy season and I am sure not going to change now, but will definitely change after the Holidays. The point is, you probably cannot tell now exactly what your will need in the future.

So.. Whatever cart you decide on I would highly recommend the following. First and most important. Before entering your product data into any cart, add it to an excel spreadsheet. You can save this to tab delineated file. Then you can cut and past your data to the cart if necessary, but most carts have a facility to upload the data, if formatted right. This way, if you become dissatisfied with your cart, they cannot hold your Product data hostage and you can easily move to another cart.

Be honest with yourself about your ability to understand programming. OsCommerce (a .php cart) is a great cart and comes with the source code, but it can be a bit of pain to set-up (I am setting up one now on another domain). Another cart I am looking at and I think has great potential and comes with the source code is PDAdmin (this is an .asp cart - needs windows server) which you have to pay a 1 time fee for, but the basic cart and admin is clean and setup quite nice. If you do not have basic programming skills and do not want to invest the time to learn, you might pay someone to help you set up a cart like oscommerce and give you some basic lessons to update it or consider a monthly fee based cart with good support.

You will have to decide if you want to develop your own WebPages and just add code to your product pages to submit to the cart or if you want the cart to build your whole website. The first takes a little programming skill ,but can be learned fairly easily. Once one product is set up, you can cut and past the same code, then only change the product ID number for each of you products.

2 issues that I did not think about too much in the beginning, but which are very important are:
1. How will you let your customers know the status of their orders? for example, when the product ships can you easily add the tracking number and will it send an email with that number to your customer?
2. Shipping can be a royal pain. If you want to use the UPS or FedEx server, you will need to know the weight of every product. I think a much easier way is to charge by the total price and then add a little for heavier products if the cart will allow this.

Hope this helps a little.

[AnyDemo]

Hello,

oscommerce is free. It should takes less than a few hours to set up the shopping cart if you are new to oscommerce.

[ablack]

I used mcart from my hosting company ait and it works great! You don't have to go to their website though you can go to www.mcart.com I love it :D

[j-khoa2]

I also offer easy to install shopping carts.

[shahgee]

Hi Guys



Here are top 4 business sites of the world that i am sure you haven't seen before take a look on these>
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[jacksan]

I suggest you to use http://www.zeuscart.com which is the best shopping cart software to fulfill all your needs. It's open source ecommerce software and it's highly secured. They provide good support also.

[Misty Hayden]

I already have a website with products on it but would like to try and integrate a shopping cart that in inexpensive and easy to add to MS Front Page....

[LaneHost]

We have some customers that use x-cart with much success.

[babygirlhelen]

Hey there, the cart in my sig is a zencart. It's open source, based in OScommerce (not sure about the story but something to do with some of the designers of oscommerce splitting off to do things better - or something?) and its really well supported via its forum.

I've only ever tried zencart so I haven't got anything to compare with, but I've never built a website before and I managed to get the whole thing running the way I wanted and looking like I wanted in a few weeks working a couple of hours a day. All totally free.

So far very pleased.

[lesya]

I suggest you try magento or pinnacle cart. Both of them are relatively new on the market but have already become quite popular.

No matter on which one you decide try using web service to help you migrate the data. (e.g. cart2cart) it will automate data trasfer to magento (http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/supported-carts/55-magento), pinnacle cart (http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/supported-carts/54-pinnacle-cart) or any other of your choice.

[martine29]

Hi,

I would recommend Magento shopping cart (http://www.zestbit.com/samuel29/view/Magento-eCommerce-Development.aspx) as it is groundbreaking open source technology. It is the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the market with feature-rich, enterprise-grade eCommerce solution. Magento eCommerce Development offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the user experience, content and functionality of their online stores.

[wallawalla3]

I ran accross a couple of web sites with a different
approach to E-commerce. Instead of using a
shopping cart, they use online forms.
http://www.elbowspace.com/FRHformexample103.htm
http://www.fospace.com/FOSformexample8.htm
Basically, they are web forms that calculate totals,
tax & shipping with each product or quantity
selection. Products & quantities are listed
in a drop down selection box, a check box
or a free form text box. My guess is that Javasript
performs the calculations without ever having to
resort to the server.

[web2seller]

I can either all Joomla! together with Virtuemart 1.1.4 recommended, it can also individually configure which one can also offer hosting packages.

Or one might draw on the fork of XT: Commerce is called Self-commerce, and here you can download it here Self-Commerce (http://www.self-commerce.de)

Here is the Demo (http://demo.self-commerce.de/)

[zeevblaze]

Magento car may be my first choice because it is a booming open source technology and see the full content, the functionality of an online store offers flexibility and control will be.

[lucasdean123]

It's designed to be applied under SSH so data is averagely safe. It doesn't store credit information on the server so that nails down that trouble. Works with several merchant facilities as well as has a huge support area on their site.

[defixon]

If you want to minimize coding for your shopping cart, I'd go with Foxy Cart. Very intuitive, with an easy-to-use interface, and you will barely have to use any code to implement it.

[jasonhoods]

SnapJar check if you are looking to open a duty free shop. interface is simple and clean. found them when he was looking for places to buy online business.

[C.KDavid]

try and take a look t this othis might meet your requirements

[C.KDavid]

I would recommend looking at shoppingcartelite.com I've been using this one for quite sometime now and so far i haven't got issues..

[robertlouis16]

It doesn't store credit info on the server so that nails down that trouble. Exploits with several merchant facilities as well as has a huge support area on their site.

[aurtherblack]

Well,The video is fast becoming one will be for all e-commerce site.It is a common misconception that video products only expensive and complex research end shopper is effective for many of effort required. he simplest and most powerful to use video to communicate and engage their customers, e-commerce sites not to miss this opportunity.

[matana05]

This is an interesting discussion. Thanks a lot for the information

[steview]

hi there.. i use ShoppingCartElite, just wanna share this one to you guys.

[adolphalro]

Shopping recommendation from my side are:
- Magento.
- Spiffy Stores
- Zencart...

[johnwaugh123]

It doesn't store credit info on the server so that nails down that problem. Works with several merchant installations and has a huge support area on their site.

[nilam]

Yes, you are right. OSCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is powered by a dedicated, strong, and ever growing community.

[EvaBrown]

I work with many shopping cart software solutions. But I can suggest the most popular: ZenCart, Joomla VirtueMart, osCommerce, PrestaShop and TomatoCart. All this software is free and user-friendly. You can easy manage your web store if it based on one of this systems.

[stephanramies312]

It's designed to be used under SSH so data is fairly safe. It doesn't store credit info on the server so that nails down that troubles. The works with several merchant facilities and it has a huge support area on their site.