What Shopping Cart Should I use ?

Hi guys,

I am launching my online health shop site within the next 2/3 weeks. Everything is sorted apart from the shopping cart.

I have signed up to payapal's business account, and was going to use their shopping cart for my site.

However, I feel this may put potential customers off when they go to pay and see that the payments are going through paypal. Is this the case in your own personal experiences? Or does it not really matter?

Is there any other types of shopping cart out there that are simple to use and for which you do NOT need to have a merchant bank account for?

Any help much appreicated.

 

I was thinking about using paypal to begin with as I can transfer the funds from my business account in to my personal account and then in to my bank.

Yes I will be paying double paypal fees, but I was thinking about doing this until the site takes up pace and is making a decent amount of money - I can them open a proper merchant bank account.

Is this a sensible idea?

 

Take a look at Magento. OScommerce is stagnant and old school. Magento requires a good host that may specialize in hosting Magento sites but the software is really good

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

 

Sorry you don't know what you are talking about. I've worked with Ocommerce for years and it frequently stagnant and has had slow release dates. Yes Magento has some requirements of a host but it does not require a VPS. Want to run it on a cheap overselling host then forget it. Its for a real business but claiming you need a VPS is false. Might have been true early on but they are upgrading so often it isn't any longer and hosts have stepped up and provided service for it.

As for plugins Magento has a lot of its functionality built in and is a cleaner more well thought out modern cart. plugin support and development has nothing to do with Oscommerce itself often being stagnant.

I don't know a single developer that doesn't believe Magento will eventually wipe Oscommerce out for any real business. Its the future of Open source ecommerce and Oscommerce will be the past.

 

You're behind the times my friend. I realize that your connection with budget overselling hosts that have fantastico installs of Oscommerce might taint your views but Oscommerce is a dinosaur in terms of code. here - catch up on some reading

http://www.mytestbox.com/news/magento-ecommerce-software-challenge1/

http://www.buzzes.eu/en/2008/09/hap...ng-based-open-source-e-commerce-solution.html

 

I'm a big fan of ZenCart... but basically just google for free shopping cart, and ensure it's compatible with your payment processing methods

 

Oscommerce is an utter trainwreck. Magento is where its at.

There is a bit of a learning curve but Magento is vastly more professional on every level imaginable.
Most noteworthy...separation of the design from the logic bits. Oscommerce code is frankly the polar opposite and impossible to design properly for.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by professional.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

I agree that Magento is a very good shopping cart if you are willing to pay a little more for hosting although crucial hosting do it for $25 a month which isn't too bad. See here.

For payment options, I think that it is good to have Paypal as an option but you could do a variety so that people have a good choice of what to use. There is paypal, protx, worldpay and google checkout.

 

I use and love Zen Cart. They have a fantastic support board and lots of great mods that can be added.

 

Id used zen cart, its amasing. If not Cubecart isnt too bad

 

There are shopping carts that you don't have to have your own payment processor or gateway for. QBaroo is one, www.qbaroo.com, and as a hosted eCommerce app you automatically get upgrades and new features as part of their service. Here's a link to one of their clients, who has a heath supplements store with them: http://www.fortifyhealth.com/. (FYI - they've converted hundreds of sites from zen cart and osCommerce - PM me and I'll tell you why).

 

Hey, thanks for the positive feedback about QBaroo. We've had many great success stories, especially the ones we convert from Zen and OS!

 

I am Enrico Giubertoni the author of buzzes.eu blog. Thank you for your citation to my blog post about Magento.

I am trying Magento and I like Magento although it is very young, has some bugs, and some components need to be more stable and mature.

Magento is an important solution because it has born from a marketing perspective instead of a programming/coding perspective.

This fact makes magento suitable for marketing teams ... and in my opinion this is the core of E-Commerce: a good e-commerce site has to be relyable, of course but it DOES sell goods and services. Otherwise it is unuseful.

Magento is full of marketing services and usability tools. Every piece of code of Maento is about marketing and strategy.

Magento is completely merged into Marketing Philosophy: it has layered navigation services, it is based on Chris Anderson's Long Tail Theory, it has many tools up to optimize multiple brands upon multiple stores, it has many tools in order to optimize Adwords campaigns, and so on

Even if Magento has to grow in many aspects, i.e. its SEO services, its Social Shopping tools, in its Corporate blog integration, but it is in E-commerce marketing strategy.

In my opinion Zen Cart, OsCommerce, Virtuemart, are excellent platforms, for selling goods on line but they are not e-commerce site.

An Ecommerce site reacts to people's needs, an on line catalogue shows only products.​

I know that in Zen Cart, OScommerce, Virtuemart, you can put Google Analytics code, Google AdWords, and Google Web Site Optimizer, you can give SEO services, and that platforms are more stable and fastest than Magento.

But it is completely different approach to attach piece of code to services, rather than implementing an Internet strategy services.

Magento aims to be an e-commerce platform rather the others that are more advanced databases.

Of course these are my humble opinons.

If you are interessed in exploring Magento also in its marketing approach, I wrote some posts about it under the Magento tag of my blog.

Regards
Enrico Giubertoni
www.buzzes.eu

 

Greetings to all who uses Zen Cart

Have you seen store manager for Zen Cart? SM for Zen Cart is on public beta-testing stage right now. Software still can have small bugs and issues, but it is almost ready.

zencart-manager.com

 

I somehow find OSCommerce and Zen Cart very similar They're pretty good, although I never understood why OSCommerce doesn't have basic admin page protection :-/

Anyway, I suggest you give Interspire Shopping Cart a try. It might not be free, but I really like it, there are some things that really make it unique. BTW, there's a demo on their website as well.

 

you can still use paypal and pay them monthly for their pro account and you don't have to use them as a checkout method, they just simply process for you.
I originally set up a merchant account and was paying out the ass for it! paypal is free and only charges when somone buys something PLUS you print the shipping label right off the paypal screen, so you don't spend money you dont have! I have only had 1 person cancel an order cause of paypal, and maybe a few others didn't finish paying because they figured out is was through paypal during check out. It doesn't matter because it wasn't enough people to go back to the hassle of a merchant account. If I start running 3k a month through, I would change to a merchant account tho.

As for a shopping cart, I ended up payming monthly for coolcart.net absolutley NOTHING to install!!! everything is on their end, you just put some simple HTML in. got the job done especially if you don't need anything complex

 

Thank you, Bob