I took a detailed glance at 26 shopping carts to find 10 or 12 to review for the Guide. And yes, that’s a lot of carts.

And though I whined my way through the middle part, WOW, did I learn a lot.

First, features I thought would be hard-to-find were found in most carts…nifty bits like one-page checkout, coupon codes, and shipping calculators. Next, some carts had stuff I didn’t think to look for, like—

• Wishlists
• Gift notes
• Image zoom
• Selling and accepting gift certificates, and
• Selling on Facebook

I’ve seen them around, but I thought fancy pants features like those were out of reach for tiny budgets. They may not be free, but they can cost less than $40 a month. Pretty cool, eh?

So your suggestions, my shopping, and The Google built a lengthy list of carts worth glancing at, but I only have time and space for 12, so over half of them had to go.

Here’s where they went—

Shopping Cart Cutting Criteria

At first glance, almost all the carts were doable. A few were easy kicks to the curb—AgoraCart’s admin panel was painful to look at, Magellan Commerce pissed me off by hiding their price tag, and ShopSite was kinda meh for the money—but after booting those I still had twice as many carts as I needed.

And I had to be careful which shopping carts to boot, right? I didn’t want to keep a cart based on price alone, or for a specific business model, or just because it was tiny like us. After all, as our work whistles along we’ll have a bit more to spend, we’ll branch out a bit, and, ideally, our businesses will get big(ger). So I needed carts that we can grow into, and that will continue to grow with us.

And while our needs will vary and change with time, one thing will never change: We’re selling stuff to make money. So while our personal goals may be to share our gifts and change the world, our shopping cart’s first and only priority needs to be getting every person who clicks the Buy button all the way to the Thank You page.

Once again, Web Design for ROI came in handy. It has a list of questions that visitors ask during checkout to get us into the mind of our customers (p. 157), and the Checkout Process Design Guidelines use real-world examples to explain how not to scare them away (p. 161). I was surprised which carts didn’t survive this next cut…

Shopping Carts: In the Trash

Most of the design guidelines in Web Design for ROI can be addressed with design tweaks and/or customization. However, there are two features we can’t do a darned thing about, and they are infamous for killing sales: Required registration and login for checkout.

So say goodbye to PrestaShop, Cube Cart, ZenCart, OSCommerce, Interspire and Google Checkout.

I wouldn’t recommend these carts to anyone because of this single issue, so they’re in the trash. For more information, read The $300 Million Button. If you have Web Design for ROI, also read through all of Chapter 9 where these issues come up often.

In the bin with the sale-killers is FatFreeCart, which is not inherently bad, but there are shopping carts at the same price (free), that require the same skills (copy/paste), with far more features.

On top of the pile goes Magento, which is robust and feature-rich, but too damned complicated. You could manage the complexity with sufficient help, but dedicated support requires an enterprise license that costs $11,125 per year. Per year. Also, there are pricey add-ons for features that other carts include for free. $100 to sell on Facebook? $950 for drop-shipping? How. Annoying.

Shopping Carts: On the Shelf

After dropping the shopping carts I definitely wouldn’t recommend, I had to cut a few carts that I probably would. This was hard because I like these carts quite a bit, but I couldn’t keep more than 12 for the Guide. These are worth a longer look, but for now they’re on the shelf—

Big Cartel

This serves only artists, and I didn’t have room for two niche market carts. I picked Etsy because it’s the big’un, but bigger doesn’t mean it’s better. When I get clear of the Guide, I’ll compare BigCartel, Etsy, and ArtFire and we’ll see what’s what.

Ecwid

I was tickled to find three WordPress shopping cart plugins on the list. Still, one had to go, and this was the one that went. My favorite bits are kinda rare among free shopping carts: cart widgets, real-time shipment tracking, exporting data in a spreadsheet format, real-time shipping quotes for Australia Post and DHL, and a cart design especially for mobile devices.

FoxyCart

FoxyCart was upfront and honest about how their fancycool cart only supports modern browsers, which makes it a little niche-y for the Guide, but it still looked interesting. There’s no integrated inventory management, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it for selling items that needs counting.

Shopping Carts: Who’s Left?

• 1ShoppingCart
• 3DCart
• ClickBank
• CoreCommerce
• E-Junkie
• Etsy
• PayPal Standard
• Shopify
• Shopp
• Volusion
• WP-eCommerce
• Yahoo! Merchant

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Now the real research begins…

Photo credit: loop_oh