eCommerce Shopping Cart Solution Reviews

Zoovy offers multiple sales channels all feeding off one product database.

I’m always on the lookout for cool new features that shopping cart solutions offer. I found one really cool one today. Check this out:

Zoovy's Multiple Sales Channel Feature

If you’re a niche merchant that sell your items via multiple channels, this solution is worth a look. You can sell your products on eBay, multiple online storefronts, Amazon, Yahoo Shopping and Pricegrabber. Pretty cool.

Cruising Zoovy's site, I didn’t find any pricing information or many details about their solution. Is it a hosted solution? What’s the pricing structure? It’s a classic ambiguous web technology site. You know, great looking site but it doesn’t provide information on what the company does or the products they offer. Maybe this is by design to get potential customers to call their 800 number? If so, it worked. That’s what I’m doing right now…

Hosted Shopping Cart Solution Report (Feb. 2007)
MonsterCommerce Losing Market Share?
Every time MonsterCommerce releases an update to their shopping cart solution our forum sees an increase of merchants looking for a new solution. Why this happens is best saved for its own blog entry but most tend to be moving to 3dCart because of their easy to use user interface and more robust feature list. A few of their larger stores seem to prefer Volusion. Both are great solutions (in my opinion) and offer a better product (overall) than MonsterCommerce.

I’ve found this site to be interesting:

CubeCart – Modular PHP e-Commerce Solution

Are you considering hosting your own PHP store but need a solution with commercial backing and some sort of support? Then CubeCart deserves a look. This UK based company offers their solution for $69.95. You find the hosting and install the solution. The process is very similar to setting up Zen Cart or X-cart. It modular structure reminds me of setting up this blog with Drupal (I can’t say enough good things about Drupal by the way). You install the core platform and then can pick and choose add-on modules to increase the available features.

Have store. Will Travel.

Changing hosts is a pain in the neck for any website. This hassle is quickly compounded when you have a online store. Finding a new shopping cart solution is the easy part, moving product and customer data is a whole ‘nother story. Each hosted shopping cart solution organizes their databases differently. So your exported data from your old store isn’t likely to slide into the new database without some finagling (read: a lot of finagling). Typically, you’ll have to map each data field to match the destination field. Fun stuff, especially if you maintain a large store with an extensive amount of data to move.

We are so many hosted cart solutions so pushy when it comes to upgrades?

Have you had issues with your store after your solution released an upgrade? I have. Many, many, many times. It got to the point that I cringed when a new release was announced. I felt like Tokyo upon hearing Godzilla just booked passage for a short stay. I would clear my schedule in anticipation of lengthy tech support calls and lost sales. It was a monster of a headache. Eventually it got so bad, I just moved my stores to new solutions.

One of the new solutions I moved to promised to never put in fear of the forced (pushed) upgrade. It was Volusion and they take a very unique approach eith their upgrades. They allow me to upgrade the software for the my stores whenever I feel like (queue singing angels..). All I have to do is push a button and begin (pull) the upgrade process. This means I can do in the early morning hours when the large percentage of my customers are sound asleep. Viola. No lost sales. To top it off, Volusion does a great job during the QA process so post-upgrade bugs are very uncommon.

Modular Merchant offers a scalable hosted shopping cart solution and a flexible approach to serve merchant’s needs.

Here is a listing of some of Modular Merchant’s features:

Modular Merchant's Feature Chart (PDF)

Creating and maintaining a xml or txt Google sitemap for your store can be a huge time drain. Sure it’s worth it. Adding one will ensure that Google will have a detailed road map to crawl your site and make sure all your product pages are indexed . This is hugely important for newly launched stores.

Two hosted cart solutions I use make it real easy to create and maintain a Google sitemap. Volusion and 3DCart automatically generate an asp page called (or something like) googlesitemap.asp. Its updated whenever you add a page or product to your store. You can then easily point Google to this page of regular downloading. Talk about easy. No more searching for third party tools or site to crawl your store in order to generate a site map.

A number of the top e-commerce hosted shopping cart solutions have customer forums where you can pop in and checkout what’s going on with the solution. These are invaluable tools when researching a move or opening to new store. By digging through these forums you can gauge the cart's customer service abilities, customer sentiment and even ask pre-sales questions. There’s nothing like getting honest feedback about a cart before opening a store.

Of course you can always visit our forum for up to date info on the major hosted shopping carts by visiting: eCartReviews Forums

eWish has partnered with Monster and Yahoo to allow their merchants tools to integrate their gift registry system. For a one- time setup fee of $599.00 and an ongoing 5% commission fee, merchants can add eWish’s to their stores. This allows merchants to have “add to registry” buttons on their product pages. eWish has a pretty robust gift registry solution that includes a customizable e-notifciation, guestbook, RSVP system, and on-line photo album.

If you have a store that caters to gift market, this add-on is worth a look. A few hosted shopping cart solution offer a Wish List feature (InstanteStore and Volusion) but they are geared more toward the individual doing the shopping. Conversely, gift registries can be distributed to a group of people (gift givers) directing them to purchase the desired items that have been preselected by the gift receiver.

Search Engine Optimization 101– Marketing Keywords on the Internet

Build it and they will come. This famous line might apply to ball fields but not to web sites. Getting people to visit a web site takes a lot of work. Getting people to visit a site via a search engine when they are looking for something specific is even harder.

This paper will review the process for basic search engine optimization (SEO henceforth). Covered are the basic components of marketing a site to attract specific traffic. These components include keywords, directories, back links and content.

The first step in SEO is to define your keywords. For instance, Amazon.com’s keywords could include; books, online bookstore, etc. Careful thought should be placed in your keyword selection. This phase is the foundation to support all other SEO efforts. Fredrick Marckini in Keyword Selection - The Most Overlooked Element of Success, August 2002, Market Postion had this to say about keyword selection: