Shopping for Shopping Carts: The Questions

People pay for stuff online. Lots of stuff. All the time.

They pay for physical things, digital things, and services about to be rendered. They type in their card number, click a button, and send money over the wire (or wireless) to a vendor or service provider. And if the product is a subscription, money is sent automatically every week/month/year until someone makes it stop.

On the other end of the wire (or wireless), business people like us receive email notifications that an order has been received, a deposit has been made, or an invoice has been paid. Money has arrived–Cha-ching!–and it’s waiting patiently, virtually, for us to pick it up.

It’s magic! Or not.

It’s like magic but, of course, it’s not magic. It’s an e-commerce shopping cart. And it’s complicated.

There’s validation and authorization and certification, shipping calculators and currency converters, the secure sockets layer and all manner of happy horseshit. And that’s what’s behind the scenes.

On our side, the vendor side, there’s a storefront and inventory, customer service and affiliate payments, upsells and sidesells and fees.

Lots and lots of fees.

Registration fees, application fees, service fees, processing fees, transfer fees, and hosting fees. Some fees are paid regularly, some just once, some with every transaction, and very few are refundable.

Like I said: It’s complicated.

So when I get emails like this one…

Hi there,

I have a client that wants a shopping cart for her Web site. I’ve used X-Cart which was a bear to set up and seemed kind of redundant. Does anyone have a great, easy to set up, user friendly, customizable solution for this? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

…I think: What a good question. Easy? Friendly? Customizable? Sure.

But what about the rest of it?

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Choosing an E-Commerce Shopping Cart

Choosing the right e-commerce shopping cart is a royal pain in the ass. Because there is no “right” shopping cart.

There is no “right” shopping cart or even a “best” shopping cart. There’s only the shopping cart that’s right and best for what you’re doing now and 3 to 6 months from now.

So beware of quick, simple answers to the What’s The Best Shopping Cart? question. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Really.

The correct answer to the What’s The Best Shopping Cart? question is more questions, like—

• Are you a nonprofit?
• Do you use a merchant account or do you use a payment processor like PayPal ?
• How many products do you have?
• Are you selling non-tangibles, like services or digital downloads?
• Do you sell both physical and digital products?
• What’s your budget?
• Do you want to pay all up front, by the month, or not at all?
• Do you have cash immediately available for registration and application fees?
• For tangible products, do you need shipping calculators and inventory management?
• For digital downloads, do you need file storage and automated management of the customers’ download process?
• Do you want to combine multiple products into a bundle with a new price?
• Do you want to offer discounts or coupons?

Whew.

A heap of stuff, right?

But each question is important and many affordable shopping carts don’t do all of them. Or most of them.

And wait, there’s more!

When I ran my shopping cart questions past Tonya over at @Rising Star Ideas, she added—

• Do you want a hosted service or do you want to host the shopping cart at your site?
• Do you want to automatically follow-up with customers by email?
• Do you want to upsell additional products after or during the purchase?

And that’s not all!

Today, a month later, I’m wondering if all e-commerce shopping carts—

• Manage stuff after the order is placed, like shipping confirmation emails and tracking numbers?
• Manage some part of affiliate program sign-ups, monitoring, and payments?
• Accommodate multiple websites? Would we need multiple shopping cart accounts and then have to pay multiple fees?

That’s when I decided…

…this shopping cart thing is beyond an email or a blog post. Or even a series of blog posts.

AND it’s too important to guess at. We can’t just type “e-commerce shopping cart” into Google and choose whatever’s listed first. It’s too easy to pick something that costs a lot and doesn’t fit what we’re doing.

AND when you start clicking on those search results, many sites are poorly-veiled affiliate link pits with no real help for making a good decision. No product research, no insider’s insight, just the links that pay the most.

AND if you ask around, like I did, you’ll find that folks doing business online are using whatever was free with their hosting, whatever they thought looked good, or whatever everyone else is using.

AND just because a shopping cart is included free with your website hosting package doesn’t mean it’s good for you and what you’re doing. It’s not free if it’s crappy and costs you customers.

AND just because a shopping cart’s description says it does something, doesn’t mean it does it well. Or at all.

So.

I’m going to suss out this shopping cart thing.

I’ll throw that list of questions at eight or ten affordable shopping carts we know and love (and hate) to see how they measure up. And I’ll tell you about it in a way that you can make smart decisions based on facts and features instead of opinions and promises.

But.

I feel real sure I missed a question or two. Or six. Would you read through those bullet points again and see what I forgot to ask? If you figure out which question(s) I missed, leave it in the comments below.

And if you have a question about one of the questions, leave that in the comments, too, k?

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The answers are coming. Thanks in advance for your help,

Photo credit: It’sGreg

Tagged as: shopping_carts