24 replies to this topic

[flying]

I want to integrate shopping cart facility and credit card processing facility into my website. Can anyone recommend me companies which offer these services?

[Jill]

Welcome flying!

Jill

[Randy]

Welcome flying!

It really depends upon what you need in a shopping cart. There are many, many choices available. osCommerce is free, so many people use it. There are about 4,000 other options, some that cost and some that are free.

The main things I look at when reviewing cart software are:

• Does it integrate with the payment processor I want to use?
• Is it search engine friendly?
• Is it easy to configure and change the layout/design elements?
• Does the producer offer support?
• Is the Admin Interface logical and easy to use?
• Does it offer the type of reporting features I need?
• Does it include Froogle dump capability?
• Is the underlying code un-encrypted so that I can tweak things if need be?

Which to choose is really going to depend upon your specific needs. IMO you're better off to set out a list of features you want --especially the reporting stuff that too many overlook-- as a first step. Then look for carts that satisfy those needs.

It's much easier to do that now than it is to change your cart 6 months down the road, even if it means choosing a cart that costs $$$'s instead of going with a freebie.

[orangecat]

Hi Flying.

I've used PayPal as a credit card processor. You can add shopping cart capability to your site. PayPal no longer requires people to become members in order to use a credit card through a site that includes their shopping cart functionality. There is a $2000 maximum usage through PayPal unless the customer signs up and becomes a verified PayPal member. You can download web package addons through the PayPal site for FrontPage, Dreamweaver and a few others. The addons integrate into the packages and create the HTML for the Add to Cart and View Cart buttons. All of the payment processing is done on the PayPal site which saves you money on hosting charges. They even have a seller protection policy to protect PayPal members from costly chargebacks. This is one option anyway. Hope that helps.

Orange Cat

[T Bill]

Another important factor is whether it is dependent on cookies. It's been a couple of years, but back in 2002, we were using a Miva shopping cart and we began to get more and more customer complaints about shopping carts not working all together or not able to hold more than one item.

Note - we believe that for every customer that communicates, there are 20 to 30 that just go away unhappy. If anything, this figure is conservative.

So, we did a test and found over 25% of our visitors had cookies turned off. We built our own shopping cart and resolved the problem.

Maybe shopping carts today have tackled the problem but you should make sure or you could lose substantial sales.

A great shopping cart report is offered by WilsonWeb at http://www.wilsonweb.com/

<edit>After becoiming an active member (20 posts) live links are fine</edit>

Edited by projectphp, 09 June 2004 - 01:05 AM.

[sanity]

We're using osCommerce for a project at the moment and so far so good. Another options is SunShop by Turnkey.

[GeordieSEO]

Actinic is very good.

[delridge]

If you're shopping in the "cart for free or cheap" department, another option is clickcartpro. There are a gazillion other options, I only mention this one because it's one of the few I'm familiar with and I had a reasonably good experience with it.

I made a similar post in another thread on this same forum.

Matt

[magellan]

Mal's Ecommerce - easy to use and the basic version is free

[T Bill]

Have you considered a YahooStore?

A small store is inexpensive and the immediate exposure you get should generate sales the first week and make the monthly payment negligable. You can also ( a recent addition) build your site using their tool or use Dreamweaver, Front Page, etc. and either use their hosting or your own. If you use your own, simply use tags to build product pages. They support static and dynamically created stores. And, the dynamic pages are indexable by search engines.

You do not get any guaranteed search engine listings on Yahoo, but, a good site will naturally do well. All seo rules apply.

You'll be hard put to find better features anywhere. You will have great stats on traffic, sales, popular shopping keywords, etc. You get cc processing with every major card and international capabilities as well. Your site is made available in XML format for the paid inclusion and trusted feed opportunities.

We started out with a YahooStore back in '98. It gave us the proffesional foundation we needed. In 2000, we left to build our own site and shopping cart because we could afford to.

I miss that old YahooStore. It was great and it is as much an education in eCommerce as it is was a good store platform.

http://smallbusiness...o.com/index.php
Check out Merchant Solutions.

[K.S. Katz]

I've worked with a couple of shopping carts and here's my reviews:

- OSCommerce: great open source shopping cart that's search engine friendly. If you don't know PHP, you'll have to hire someone to configure it for you.
- Interchange: this shopping cart can do pretty much anything, including tieing in backend functions; however, it requires a steep learning curve.
- MonsterCommerce: they're a nice option to Yahoo Store and offer great customer support. What I like is that they're upgrades are based on client feedback.

Good luck!

[BrianR]

A little late to this party, but...

Welcome to the forum, flying! - hope you enjoy the show!

From what I hear, Actinic has a good reputation in the UK market - I believe they've just launched version 3.

BrianR

[GeordieSEO]

It's version 7 of Actinic which has just been launched

[ezhost]

javascriptcart.com is great

[tomsk]

Our site uses Actinic and I think it is very user freindly for the owner and the customer.