Unfortunately, there is a downside to free: free products lack good documentation and support. For example, there is no official support group that you can call when you need help. And there is no official user's guide to explain how to use the software. You usually have to search through user forums to find answers to your questions.Should I Buy or Lease a Shopping Cart?
There are two basic models for online shopping carts:
- Pay a one time fee for the software and install it on your web server: This can be a daunting task unless you are comfortable working with Linux web servers and configuring web-based software. The good thing about this model is that you don't have to pay monthly fees, and the software is usually much more customizable than leased shopping carts. If you have the skills to install the software on your server, or if you hire a website designer to install and configure your shopping cart, this method is more economical than leasing.
- Pay a monthly or yearly fee to lease the software: This model is easy to implement because you don't need to install, configure, or maintain any software. If you are going to do it yourself and have little web experience, this is the easiest way to get started. The downside is that leased software is often hard to customize and many ecommerce sites need some customization. Furthermore, it can be very expensive when you add in the cost of leasing over many years.
What Shopping Cart Features Should I Look For?
Most shopping carts come with standard features like unlimited categories and products, web-based administration, easy-to-use product creation screens, and tax and shipping calculation. Unfortunately, not all carts include all the functions YOUR business will need to operate an online store.
The following is a list of features to look for in a shopping cart:
Installation and Design
- Easy-to-use web interface: A web interface allows you to administer your shopping cart from any web browser that is connected to the internet.
- Shopping Cart Reporting: The ability to get detailed reports about your sales, inventory, states, users, categories, products, destination zones, taxes, shipping rates, orders, membership levels, etc.
- Multiple Languages: The ability to display multiple languages in your shopping cart
- Customer Support: Most carts usually provide email or forum-based support, but sometimes they provide live phone support.
- Upgradeable: Find out if you can get free updates as the software is improved. Usually you can get free updates for 6 to 12 months.
- Template-based Design: Tempate-based designs make it easier to customize the look of your website
- WYSIWYG Editor for Products: This feature allows you to enter product text and images using a word-processor-like editor.
- Content Pages: Does your cart allow you to create content pages? For example, can you create an "About Us" page?
- Mini-Cart: A mini cart is a small box that indicates if the user has items in their shopping cart. These are usually located on the top or side of the page. Most carts have this feature.
What Hosting/Server Platform is Required?
Will your website and shopping cart be hosted on a Linux / UNIX server or a Windows server? If you are going to use a hosted shopping cart, you probably don't need to worry about this unless you already have other web-based software applications installed on your current web host.
If you are going to buy shopping cart software, your choice might be limited by your server choice. Currently there are many more shopping carts made for Linux / UNIX than for windows.
Summary
The best solution is to first determine your specific shopping cart requirements and then find a cart that fits your needs. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a cart that does EVERYTHING you want it to do. If this is the case, you'll need to have some custom development done to add a new function to the cart.
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