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Tips on finding the best e-commerce software
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Review and compare shopping carts: how to choose the best ecommerce softwareNavigating shopping cart reviews and making a good decision
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!
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 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:
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.
Understand the "Total Cost" of running your storeDone? 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.
Consider using ProductCart
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.
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