Feature Set: AbleCommerce comes with all the features you'd expect in a shopping cart – infinite category and product levels, options, kits, specials, quantity discounts, coupons, sortable categories, content/web pages, inventory management, order management, integrated payment gateways, taxes, reports and more. There are also many features not found in most shopping cart packages though. Among them are digital delivery of electronic goods, subscriptions (such as a gift of the month club), international currencies, the most flexible shipping options of any shopping cart software, powerful SEO features (see below), product reviews and recurring billing. What sets AbleCommerce apart though is the user interface that's head and shoulders above it's competitors. Extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) make for a faster, more attractive, easier-to-use interface. That means customers move through your store more quickly and easily, meaning more orders. For example, the One Page Checkout (using AJAX) allows customers to choose shipping and payment options in a single page! SEO: The developers at AbleCommerce have paid close attention to optimizing the applications friendliness to search engines. Title bars are dynamically generated using category and product names, as are the URLs. Content is well positioned for Google and others to be able to index content. There are also 3rd party tools for managing elements like the title bar and META tags. Users generally report substantial gains in traffic, especially if they are migrating from a shopping cart package more than a few years old. Customizable: Yes, with a catch. AbleCommerce is unencrypted and can be customized in any way you'd like. However, it uses many technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, SQL, AJAX, CSS, C##, Velocity and more. If you aren't a veteran developer and you want to modify AbleCommerce layout or functionality, save your sanity and hire an expert. There are good developers like who can help make AbleCommerce match your business needs.. Security: AbleCommerce 7 is PCI Compliant AND PCI Certified. The July 1, 2010 deadline for merchants to use web storefront applications that are PCI certified makes this an important consideration. Installation and hosting: AbleCommerce 7 is fairly easy to install. Usually it can be done in under and hour if you're familiar with web servers. It runs on Windows web servers. Web Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 (or higher) on a separate server is optimal for performance. With dedicated web and database servers, AbleCommerce can easily scale to 50,000+ unique visitors a day. It can also run in clustered environments for sites with 100,000+ unique visitors a day. Documentation and Support: The documentation built in is mediocre. However, the support forums (forums.ablecommerce.com) are excellent sources of answers for even the most advanced users. Again, an experienced development and/or hosting partner is a must for success. Conclusion: If you're a veteran of web storefronts, you'll love working with AbleCommerce. It's rich feature set, customizability, scalability, security, search engine friendliness and price make it hard to beat. Look for experienced development and hosting partners for your greatest success. With the right team, your online web storefront will blow away your competition.