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Each e-commerce store may have its custom requirements and needs. So at some occasions it can be almost impossible to say which shopping cart or ecommerce software is good and which one is the bad. It all depends on the cost, features, flexibility for customization and customer support in selecting good shopping cart software for ecommerce business.

Either you’re intending to start a new online shop or just revamping your current ecommerce business, must research properly before buying a cart and make sure it fits well into your requirement matrix and intentions to customize. This can definitely lead into lot of time saving and efforts. On the other hand, starting with shopping cart software without researching full features list, pricing and flexibility for customization may lead into much more work, additional expenditures and delay in completion. Evaluating a shopping cart software of course directly depends on your custom needs, any suggestion I make in this article may not be the rule of thumb in choosing the right solution but the outlined points below must be considered as the important factors keeping your ultimate requirements in considerations in your evaluation criteria.

Below is the list of key factors I think important in evaluating an ecommerce software.

Design & Technology

There could be two kinds of store owners or managers. First type users could be the people having online business but with minimum or no knowledge technically. So if you’re such a business owner you should clearly understand that of course your ecommerce website will have its own design and setup complications. Must enquire from several shopping cart software manufacturers and carefully read the customization and management features and rate each the shortlisted solution based on the ease they provide in design as well as management. A specific technology platform should not be basically an issue for such a group of users (PHP, ASP.NET, JAVA, Classical ASP etc…) because they’re not supposed to dig into the source code and perform required tasks. Most often, such users are only interested in a strong administration panel where they can easily customize the storefront, configure the inventory and track the sales.

Second type of users is the technically sound people who have the ability to customize, configure and maintain the sites. Such users may intend to launch an ecommerce store for their own business or for their customers. They could be most probably interested in just the coding standards and the available add-ons to enhance functionality. Since technical people mostly progress their careers in specific dimensions. So they may be more focused on the technology platform or the language used to develop the shopping cart system.

E-commerce or cart solutions are available in hosted as well as distributed environments. In my opinion, technical store owners may prefer to go with a distributed solution while non techies may like the hosted ones. Let’s explore the difference between hosted and distributed cart systems in detail below.

Hosted Shopping Cart Solutions

Little bit extension to hosting services that include facility for users to sell online is basically the core concept of hosted carts. In respect to the high competition in web hosting business, host providers are attempting to pitch better than their competitors in order to provide more facilities and flexibilities to their customers for winning more market share. So the idea of offering an ecommerce solution built in within their hosting package can definitely make the offer attractive for serious customers. You receive a strong administration panel from such shopping cart systems where as a store owner you can manage everything related to store ranging from basic design, inventory management, sales tracking and payment gateway setup. Such shopping cart solutions are geared towards online store owners with limited or no technical knowledge and relatively they provide better control to the webmaster over the site administration. In addition, all kind of maintenance, backup and monitoring activities are conducted by the host providers and store owner only takes care of promoting the business. Although one can easily modify the available store templates to match the needs and over all color scheme of the company but you get limited or no access to source code to make customized changes in the checkout or cart processing procedures. The enabling factor with hosted shopping cart solutions is that you pay nominal fee monthly and completely save the first time cost of developing a full ecommerce website.

Distributed Shopping Cart Software

Normally distributed shopping cart systems are available (mostly with source code) against a onetime fee in the form of a software pack. This package can be configured and installed at any compatible platform. Since most of the distributed e-commerce solutions are accompanied with the source code and normally geared towards technical people, so they can be enhanced and customized to match the store needs.

The disabling feature in going with distributed cart systems is that the website owner is responsible for initial setup, customization, configuration, hosting and maintenance or must hire professional services to accomplish the jobs. But on the other hand, the enabling factor in such type of store carts is the flexibility, control over processes and full access to administration.

Cross application integration

Businesses have realized the power of World Wide Web (www) and the involvement of computers in almost every business have out-dated the concept of conventional software programs where each software was treated as an independent identity and there was no concept of integration and cross application communication for sharing useful information. Today businesses need instant reconciliation with bank, affiliate sites, product manufacturers etc… At the same time, especially online shopping websites need real time shipping rates and process credit cards instantly by communicating with external payment gateways. So your ecommerce software should provide enough room to interact with various external yet accessible resources to perform all the tasks an online business needs.

Technical Support

Of course no one would like to be left unhelpful in case of problems. Must research well and see the kind of support services offered by shopping cart software manufacturer and the response time in regards to support ticket. The instant source of support questions could be blogs or forums. So check with your cart software manufacturer site if they‘re efficiently running a blog or forum for general and specific support and technical problems.

Another positive indicator is if you can find further add-ons to extend the functionality of your cart system,

It’s really not easy to select a specific cart software for your online ecommerce business. As a serious business owner you must spend enough time researching and selecting the right ecommerce software for your online store. After all you need a solution that best matches your needs and fulfills all of your online business processes

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