Review and compare shopping carts: how to choose the best ecommerce software
Navigating shopping cart reviews and making a good decision
In order to run a successful online store, you need the best ecommerce software for your business. The problem is, there are too many shopping carts out there. Which one should you pick?
Unfortunately there is a lack of objective shopping cart reviews in IT publications and small business magazines or Web sites, and you are often left with an overwhelming amount of information to review.
If we were to publish shopping cart reviews or comparisons on this Web site, they would be biased. Instead, what we offer you is 5 steps to finding the best shopping cart software for your business. They will save you a lot of time!
- Narrow down the list
- Look at live stores powered by each shopping cart
- Focus on what's most important to you
- Test the vendors' customer service
- Read user reviews
You can't possibly compare 100 different shopping carts. Yet, there is indeed an overwhelming number of e-commerce solutions available today, many of which are frankly not worth a minute of your time. You need to start by reducing the number of shopping carts that you plan to review.
How can you narrow down the list? By price, by feature, by reading reviews? These methods all work, but would require too much up-front work. Instead, here is an idea: limit your review to companies that are keeping their software up-to-date with the latest technology. For instance, look only at ecommerce software that has been integrated with "Google Checkout" (there is a different list of integrated shopping carts for the US 
and the UK ).
It's not perfect, but it's a quick way to weed out older and lower quality solutions.
Live stores can give you an immediate "feel" for how well the ecommerce software that you are looking at works in the real world. Most vendors will provide a partial list of Web stores that use their shopping cart. For example, we do so on this page. Here are two things to focus on:
- Different graphical interface
Look at a few stores to get an idea of how well the shopping cart merges with the Web site. Make sure the transition from static pages (e.g. About us) to dynamic pages (e.g. search, view basket, browse by category, etc.) is smooth. Make sure there are stores that look completely different from one another. You want to make sure that the shopping cart you pick will allow you to make your storefront look exactly how you want it to appear. - Customer experience
Pick a few live stores that you particularly like, and browse the store, perform a search, add items to the shopping cart, etc. Are you experiencing what you would like your customers to experience on your own online storefront? If not, it's time to cross that e-commerce solution off your list.
This is key given the overwhelming amount of information that you can be bombarded with. Shopping carts look similar, but they are not. Write down the top 3 things that you must have on your e-store. Then, start filtering out the programs that don't match your needs. For those that do, contact the vendors and ask them to comment on how their application supports those very features. If applicable, ask them to point out a demo store where you can see those features at work so you can quickly test them without having to spend time digging around.
For example: is support for electronic gift certificates a "must have"? Then ask the vendors to point you to pages on their demo storefronts where you can quickly see how a gift certificate is created (store administration), purchased (storefront), and redeemed (storefront).
Start by sending an e-mail message with a few pre-sale questions. Look at the quality of the reply: did they take time to understand what you needed or did they just reply with a template? How fast did they reply?
Then, visit the Technical Support area: a big factor in whether or not you can productively run your ecommerce store is the availability of good documentation: download the user guide for the shopping carts that you are still reviewing. Take a quick look at the table of contents. Make sure that whatever solution you end up choosing has good support documentation.
Look up user reviews for the shopping carts that you are most interested in. Why user reviews? Because there really is a lack of objective shopping cart reviews both in online and offline publications, unfortunately. In most cases, the reviews that you do see were written in exchange for a fee paid by the vendor.
One Web site that does not seem to take advertising dollars from shopping cart vendors, and therefore should be rather objective, is www.shopping-cart-reviews.com
What we recommend is that you look up user-submitted reviews on some of the most popular Web directories of Internet applications. Especially if you see dozens of reviews for a shopping cart, you can get a pretty good idea of the good and the bad.
For example, here are some of the reviews submitted for ProductCart, our ecommerce software. Please note that Early Impact absolutely never submits anonymous reviews for its own software.
- User-submitted reviews on ASPIN
- User-submitted reviews on HotScripts
- User-submitted reviews on Shopping Cart Reviews
Understand the "Total Cost" of running your store
Done? Almost. If you followed the 5 tips above, you now have a very narrow list of shopping carts in front of you. It's time to figure out what it's all going to cost you before you pull the trigger.
Some of the storefront software that you are reviewing may be provided to you as a service (a hosted shopping cart solution, where software is not delivered to you), and some may be sold to you as a product (not a hosted solution: software is delivered to you). We have created a calculator that can help you estimate the total cost of running your online store.
Consider using ProductCart
Not all shopping carts are created equal. There are many reasons why ProductCart may be a good fit for your store. Take a look at some of the things that make ProductCart powerful, flexible, and unique shopping cart software.
And if you are a Web designer looking for a good tool to use when building custom ecommerce Web sites for your clients, read about our reseller program.