Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions on great and affordable shopping cart programs?  We are looking to switch out PayPal and move to something more secure and vendor friendly.

I researched tons, but my goodness.  Any and all feedback/suggestions on what is working for you would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Tammy

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Tammy Graham, Founder & CEO, True Genius Apparel Company: fitting your personality; www.mytruegenius.com. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Look at Prestocart.com.  I`ve been using Prestostore.com for a couple of years on another business and they are easy to use and very responsive.  Their cart integrates with a variety of payment systems.

~Kim
ScrapBiz

Hi Kim,

Thanks for the feedback.  I`ll be sure to check them out.

Cheers,

Tammy

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Tammy Graham, Founder & CEO, True Genius Apparel Company: fitting your personality; www.mytruegenius.com. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Email TonerDesign, she`s using one that I think is affordable, and there were other advantages. But she can better explain it.

Craig

Thanks Craig.  I`ll do that.

Cheers,

Tammy

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Tammy Graham, Founder & CEO, True Genius Apparel Company: fitting your personality; www.mytruegenius.com. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Hi Tammy,

Any day now we will be adding the new Google Check-out. I don`t know if you are familiar with it, but it will be VERY customer friendly. Customers will be able to shop on your site, purchase something else on another site, and check-out just one time, through their Google Check Out account. There are other advantages to the Google check out that are worth looking into. Good Luck! 

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Sharon      http://www.selenalynn.com

True,
I don`t know if you`re aware.. But after reading everyone`s posting.. I was amazed how no-one even told you about a shopping cart that really rocks and will leave the competitors behind. I hear everyone talking about; Prestocart, Google Checkout? Where was I when google decided to launch a shopping cart?
Ok, here is the deal. All those shopping carts may be easy to set up and might work for now. But the truth of the fact is, whats the cost? is it proprietary software? If you decide to upgrade, is the database proprietary to the company? Is it easy to migrate (move) or easy to import / export? What is the structure of the database? What Type of DataBase, MS ACCESS(not even a database), MYSQL, MS SQL, PostGRE or FreeDB? Before you jump into a shopping cart make sure you address these issues first. Secondly, What happens if you do want to move elsewhere? Are you going to loose all your customer Database? What if you can`t export it? Then what? You loose your clients and your shopping cart?

Your solution is go with an Open Source shopping cart, something that you can migrate and take with you with minimal effort to transfer it. My advise to you would be to go with Oscommerce, I find this free shopping cart to be perfect for every-online store, not to mention you can use paypal, and a regular Credit Card Gateway and offer your customers both. It has UPS, USPO, and FedEX real time modules that you can install and will give the customer the shipping price when its time to checkout. It comes in 3 launguages. English, spanish, and Dutch I believe. It comes with so many features I don`t know where to start.
Oh and the redesign is very easy (your web designer can tweak a small file)
You can change the store front to fit your company`s need. Adding products is as easy as uploading an image from your camera to your computer.

I think before you decide to go with a cheesy shopping cart try OSCommerce first and if it doesn`t fit what you are looking for easily download an image of your database and you are on your way.. Did I mention you can download your inventory and customer`s information into an excel sheet?



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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

Dayum!! This is definitely part of why I enjoy SuN so much. Thank you to Nuevolution (Edgar)! I hadn`t even begun to think through the implications of who owns the data underneath the shopping cart. I bookmarked the site. Very cool...!

For what? For OSCommerce? Its an open source platform with various coders offereing contributions. To be honest, I find OSCommerce to be effective and easy to use.

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

:-) For putting the link on this site. I`m tending to move more into Open Source applications, the less I`m happy with Microsoft and so forth. But because it`s not as easily documented or marketed or whatever, I don`t know that much about it. Finding out that there`s this shopping cart is great, and I wouldn`t likely have known about it if you hadn`t posted that link.