E-commerce is probably one of the most difficult aspects of building a website. There are so many solutions and choices out there. It’s very confusing to the new person starting an online store. There’s really two different ways to go with e-commerce.
The first method is to use a hosted solution, wherein someone else provides the engine of the shopping cart on a separate website, away from your own.
The other solution is to buy shopping cart software and install it on your website you know it gets installed right on your servers. Now perhaps you have the skills to do that yourself or you can hire someone to do that for you. Sometimes the software company will offer installation services. I usually recommend doing that just because that if something goes wrong you have someone very knowledgeable ready to repair the situation. You will also need to purchase SSL certificates because of the security aspect of ecommerce. With a hosted solution, no SSL certification of your website is necessary.
By the way, the merchant account (credit card processing) aspect of your online store is a completely separate issue from your shopping cart. There are many different levels involved in the e-commerce aspect of building a website.
But one of the most difficult aspects about e-commerce is the store itself. You really have to take time to get your content together, photographs, descriptions, pricing, shipping, taxes, international sales, etc. There’s a lot more to ecommerce than you might think.
I have used both hosted and software purchase options, and I can’t really say that one is better than the other. It really depends on your situation.
If you want some really good support during your e-commerce building time, I would recommend a hosted solution because they usually have good training opportunities.
For hosted solutions, I have researched hosted solutions far and wide, and the one that I found to be the best hosted shopping cart solution is 1shoppingcart.com. They offer a lot of flexibility in their shopping cart, and it provides a lot of other aspects with autoresponders, newsletters, digital delivery, etc.
Because of the flexibility with 1shoppingcart, I have chosen 1shoppingcart to be a solution for myself and many of my clients. They have a lot of training venues so that you’re able to build the store yourself and then maintain it. I have often set up the online store for a client, and then they will maintain the store itself for pricing, shipping, processing of orders, emails, etc.
If you need technical support, there’s someone available to help you with that. Because the “buy now” buttons are configured in the 1shoppingcart interface, so if you don’t have the skills to alter a web page, you will need a webmaster to integrate the buttons on your website, who will also need access to your shopping cart account.
Non-Hosted Shopping Cart Software
As far as the shopping cart software that I recommended is X-Cart. They have developed a really nice software system for their shopping cart and offer excellent tech support. I’ve been very impressed with their installation services.
X-Cart has also been around long enough that many people offer services supporting X-Cart software. For instance, I bought a template for my X-Cart software that give the store a certain look, other than the default look of the shopping cart. I contracted X-Cart to install it, which is worth the money. It’s a lot easier to just have someone install it than to have to worry about involving yourself with code that you may not be very familiar with.
By the way, X-Cart also offers a hosted solution that you may want to consider. (For more information, click on the banner to the right.)
