Starting an online business can be a dream come true for many people. Who the heck enjoys making other people money, when they could be making it for themselves! If you’re like most WebCart clients you are either selling online or thinking about starting an online business. Therefore, the next logical set of questions should be how do I know if I really need a shopping cart? What is the criteria for shopping cart software? Where do I start my research? I will attempt to answer all these questions within this post.

When does someone need a Shopping Cart Solution?

Often times you might not even need a shopping cart. If you’re only selling a couple of products then your best bet would be to use paypal, and set up your two products manually. You will find that managing a shopping cart for two items may become counterproductive. Second, be prepared to spend some money on your cart. Weather you choose open source or a paid shopping cart you will need to pay for cretin services like domain registration, hosting, SSL, and a credit card merchant account if you plan on accepting credit cards via the internet.

What is needed for a shopping cart solution?

You have two options for setting up a shopping cart. The first is hosting the cart on the provider’s website. An example would be WebCart’s managed solution. For $78.00 a month WebCart will host and protect your shopping cart on our server. The second option is hosting and installing the cart on a server of your choosing. For starters, you will need a domain name, and a hosting package which supports PHP, ASP or Cold Fusion. In addition, you will need to order an SSL certificate to provide security for your online customers.
Depending on the brand of shopping cart, a designer and developer may be needed in order to customize the look and feel of your cart. With WebCart, we offer seven different templates to help customize a unique look for beginners

The best way to start researching a shopping cart solution is to request as many demo’s as possible. Play around with the cart by adding products, and categories adjusting the look and feel and setting up custom pages. By doing this you are assuring your self of a smooth eCommerce experience. .

Product management is an extremely important part of a shopping cart system. Think about it, with out products, a shopping cart is basically useless. In this final post of series comparing WebCart to osCommerce I will write about the core differences between WebCart and osCommerce as it related to product and category management. As expected, the criteria for shopping cart software shall remain prevalent in this post.

Product Management

osCommerce Product Management

Before I started working for WebCart, I was a freelance web developer. When my clients would ask me about setting up a shopping cart system, I would usually recommend osCommerce because it was a cheaper alternative to some of the paid shopping carts out there. One of the features my clients would always complain about was the method osCommerce used to display and edit categories. The chief hang up for my clients was literally fishing though hundreds of categories in order to locate one product. The backend, too many of my previous clients, was flawed and a hassle to use. With the osCommerce backend, it’s almost impossible to modify a collection of records in one instance, but rather each product and category must be modified individually.

Screen shoot of the "category and management" backend for a typical osCommerce cart.

WebCart Product Management

Once I started working with WebCart, I pushed for a simple and easy to use product management backend. After much internal debate, on how category management should function, the WebCart developers and I came up with a solution that everyone of us was happy with. The solution was to design the product and category backend with every feature that osCommerce offers plus, everything they don’t have, but in my opinion should have. The result was an easy way to upload large quantity of products, edit multiple records and do much more with just one click.

Screen shoot of the "product" backend of WebCart.

The feedback for the WebCart Backend has been great! It’s best summed up by Moriah Barnes, a webmaster for magmall.com who wrote in an email "Ever since WebCart 11 was installed for our site the updating and managing of magazines has never easier." She went on to write "On any given day I save at least 2, compared to what I used to spend updating magmall.com"
Don’t take my word for it because right now WebCart is offering a free no strings or pressure demo for anyone who would like to try the power of WebCart for themselves.