Part of setting up a new business and getting people to your products involves the use of a web store. The web store is often the primary interface between you and your customers, so it is imperative that you get the right store for the sort of business you have. Having spent a few weeks looking at store and cart software, I thought it would be useful to put my recently gained experience and wisdom here.
First, carts and stores. These two terms seems to be thrown around randomly, and I can see why. Most cart and store software has converged to the point where they are essentially the same thing. As I understand it, your cart is mostly the back end software, for processing orders, interfacing to payment gateways, stock control etc. The store software is more the store front; your business’s look and feel, and how your products are displayed. Most packages available seem to handle both of these functions.
There are two basic types of store; hosted and non-hosted. A hosted store is one with hosting provided by the store provider, and non-hosted is where you must provide the database and server to host the shopping cart or store software. (Interesting Wiki comparison here) The former is usually easier to set up and comes with technical support, whereas the latter will require you have arranged your own web host and do your own install. A hosted solution will cost a set up fee and a monthly service fee, often using a tiered approach based on the number of products in your store and the bandwidth you require. Using your own host often means you can use free software (many hosting providers have packages available in a partnership deal for little or no cost) and you probably won’t have the bandwidth issue to worry about. Your cost is limited to whatever you pay for hosting and your domain name.
I have my own hosting, where I host a number of family sites; a personal blog, my professional bio and resume, and an unrelated business site. However, I am not a software guy, so I was advised to go with a hosted solution. I tried a number of folks via their free trial offers, including Volusion, 3dCart, and Quickcart. I rejected Volusion because their customer service and tech support totally sucked – they are arrogant to deal with and their tech support don’t know their own system. Quickcart didn’t have all the functionality I wanted, so the winner was 3DCart. My primary requirement for the shop front was for each product to have its own set of options, and a back-end interface that a non-IT guy like me can use. Most cart software seems to use the template system, where you apply a template to groups of products. This is great if you sell T-Shirts, but obviously I don’t.
I signed up with 3DCart, which has a great interface, options on a per-product basis rather than option templates, and was really simple to navigate around. However, I ate my bandwidth allocation up quickly. Then I realized I wanted to do some work with subdomains, so I went back to looking at hosting my own site.
My web host provided (via SimpleScripts) several cart solutions. My internet marketing consultant and I sat down together and installed each of these on a different domain and played with Magento, Zen Cart, OScommerce and OpenCart. I decided to use OpenCart for a few reasons – the first was, again, single-product-based options rather than option templates. The OpenCart interface was pretty, with some AJAX functionality. The other thing I liked was that OpenCart seemed to have a very active and very knowledgeable user base and forum. If a business doesn’t provide its own support, it’s comforting to know that there are a lot of other users out there and a place where they can contribute and help each other.
Installation using SimpleScripts was incredibly quick and easy, and getting the look and feel of the cart right, getting the products listed and the options set up was no more than a weekend’s work. Of course, there were some issues to resolve – like integration into the USPS system and making sure the Paypal gateway worked correctly, but the forum helped with that. We still have many tweaks to make to the store and we are adding new products all the time, but everything works, including Google Analytics, which we use to track our site traffic and marketing progress.
Having the cart self-hosted meant it was easy to do blog integration (WordPress, another open-source product) using a subdomain. I have also hosted a private forum, where me, my partner and my internet marketing consultant (have I mentioned that she is HOT?) can organize the operation of the company and the store. I’m a mind mapper and find the forum format supports that well – I use phpBB – yet another open source product available through SimpleScripts.
In retrospect, I wish I had gone right for the self-hosted option first, but as a non IT guy, conventional wisdom dictated a hosted solution. I will say that there is nothing wrong with a hosted solution, but for me and my store, the self-hosted solution with OpenCart is working very well indeed, with no glitches and no problems yet.
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