Every small business owner who is looking for a shopping cart for their ecommerce business is faced with hundreds of options. According to Practical eCommerce magazine, there are about 500 ecommerce shopping cart solutions. How do you decide which one is right for you?
This is my attempt to aggregate and list information about the majority of small business ecommerce shopping carts.
The list below is in no particular order -
- Shopsite – One of the most popular small business shopping carts. You need either download and run the software on your own servers, or you can find a hosting provider to host your webstore. Lexiconn is one of the popular Shopsite hosting providers.
- Shopify – A pure SaaS (hosted) small business shopping cart that focuses on ease of use and simplicity. No installation, backups or upgrades required. Easy to get started. Read a detailed review here. Shopify recently acquired StoreSync, thus extending its ease of use to the iPhone platform. Pricing starts at $24 a month up to $699 a month. Some of the packages have transaction fees.
- Miva Merchant – Hosts about 200,000 stores. A preferred shopping cart solution for many small businesses. You can either install and run it on your own, or seek a hosting provider. Recently, the company launched a hosted platform called Miva Merchant SaaS, with monthly prices for it ranging from $59.95 to $129.95. More information here.
- ZenCart – Is an open source shopping cart solution but you need to download and install it. ZenCart’s authors claim that their software “can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic web site building and computer skills.”
- Interspire - This solution includes a shopping cart, an email marketing module and a content management system. More information here.
- MightyMerchant – A hosted shopping cart that also provides flexibility to customize according to your needs. The company also offers a web design service for small businesses that want to modify the look and feel of their webstore. More information here.
- Volusion – Yet another hosted shopping cart solution. Monthly pricing plans from $25 to $160. More information here and here.
- ProductCart – You need to download and run the software on your servers. License fee starting from $695. Additional services for additional fees. More information here.
- X-Cart – Not hosted. License fees starting from $115. The company provides installation and customization services starting from $57. Used by 20,000+ live online stores worldwide. The X-Cart shopping cart can be modified by the merchant and by third party developers. More information here.
- ShopCreator – They offer three different shopping cart packages targeted towards small to medium businesses. The Transact package charges a percentage of the shop revenues. The StartUp and Retailer packages charge flat monthly fee. All packages are fully hosted.
- Magento – Is an open source ecommerce shopping cart platform. Hosts 30,000+ merchants. Since it is open source, there are numerous third party plugins. More information including a video walk through here.
- Wahmcart ((Work At Home Mom Cart) – Easy, light-weight, hosted small business shopping cart. Available for $40 a month.
- GoECart – Hosted solution. Customizable. Provides good integration with shipping services, payment gateways. More information on the shopping cart can be found here, here and here.
- SearchFit – Hosted solution. Starting from $49 to $249 per month. Has a flexible template system that will allow you to customize your web store. The shopping cart also has a strong focus on SEO. Has functionality for email marketing and Google feeds.
- ColdFusion Shopping Cart - You have to download and run the shopping cart software on your servers. The company offers installation service for a fee. Requires MS Access, MSSQL or MySQL database running on your servers. Integrated with shipping services, Quickbooks and payment gateways.
- Fortune3 – You can download and run the shopping cart on your own. Or you can choose the hosting plans provided by the company. Pricing ranges between $30 an $160 a month with an additional one-time setup fee.
- Cubecart – Authors of the cart claim that their ecommerce shopping cart is used by “over 1 million stores worldwide”. You can download and run the ecommerce software on your own. Or use the hosting plan offered by the company.
- Network Solutions – Hosted shopping cart with price ranging from $27/month to $100/month. Additional setup fees. The company claims that their shopping cart is SEO friendly and is integrated with payment gateways. The cart also works with Google Analytics and various other third-party software. (Thank you Ross for the suggestion)
- BigCommerce shopping cart from Interspire – According to the company, “more than 1000 businesses sign up for BigCommerce every week”. This too is a hosted shopping cart with a monthly fee ranging from $25 to $300 depending on the size of your online store. ($50 set up fee for every plan).
- Big Cartel – This is an easy to set up cart marketed towards artists. Their plans range from $10 to $20 a month. No transaction fees are involve. Backseat Vintage is an example store that runs on Big Cartel.
- Etsy – This one is more of a community market place targeted towards small businesses selling handicrafts and vintage goods. Like Big Cartel, this site too is geared towards artists. There is a $0.20 listing fee per item and a transaction fee per order processed.
- Sell Simply – This cart focuses on set up simplicity. You can list items on Sell Simply via Twitter updates. There is a $1 listing fee. And payments are processed by paypal. An example site is Lisateso’s photography services.
- 1shoppingcart – This cart provides email marketing and shopping cart packaged into one solution. Pricing starts at $59/month for the combined package. (Thank you Cristie for the suggestion)
- Venderr – This cart claims that it “makes it dead simple for anyone to start selling online”. The team is based in Portugal and their pricing varies from 9 euros/month to 49 euros/month. They also have a pure transaction fee based pricing model. (Thank you Filipe for the suggestion)
…. I will be adding to this list over the coming days. In the meanwhile, here is a wikipedia article that does a good comparison of shopping cart software.
Please help me complete this list. Please add your entries to the comments section with links to relevant reviews and I will move it to the main article.
If you would like to be notified when I update this list, please follow us on Twitter @ordoroteam
Tags:choices·comparison of shopping cart software·ecommerce·hosted·list·pros and cons·SaaS·shopping cart·small business·Webstore
WebsiteGrader.com is an easy to use, free, quick health checkup for the SEO rank of your website. Their algorithm identifies the low-hanging fruits than you can easily pluck, to take your site ranking up a few notches.
But just like many things in life, this one too should be used in the right context. Use WebsiteGrader as a beginning, but not the end of your webstore optimization process. There are many things that a real human SEO consultant can offer that a tool like this cannot.
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein (or whoever said it)
Tags:optimization·ranking·SEO·websitegrader·Webstore
Most small business owners know about PCI Data Security Compliance which requires them to follow 12 stated safeguards to protect the credit card information of the consumers. Here is an article that highlights two sides to this argument.
The interviewee, being a PCI compliance consultant, highlights the importance of being PCI compliant and describes penalties that you will encounter if you don’t.
However, it is interesting to see the comments from two “frustrated” users who lash out against the idea of PCI compliance. One of them says -
Our shopping cart provider is pushing a $4000 upgrade on us with veiled threats that some of their clients that chose not to upgrade have already been fined.
One of the small business owners I work with, talked to me about how his bank required him to follow computer security guidelines or else face penalties. I intend to gather more information about PCI compliance in the coming days and share via this blog.
Tags:ecommerce·payments·PCI compliance·small business·Webstore
Shopping cart abandonment can be caused by a variety of reasons. This Q3 2009 Forrester study conducted across 3,332 online customers shows that high shipping and handling costs could be a major reason for the abandonment. The study also shows that especially women shoppers are interested in “window shopping” and would like to “save the cart” for a later purchase.
5 reasons for shopping cart abandonment
In addition to the hard metrics shown in the Forrester study, I noted earlier the “shopping experience” on your website is also an important contributor to the shopping cart abandonment problem. Customers are often confused by the site navigation or “turned off” by the poor aesthetics of the site.
However, in order to tackle the abandonment problem on your webstore, the first step is to measure what your shopping cart abandonment rate is – a metric can be easily measured by the free Google Analytics tool.
Tags:ecommerce·google analytics·shopping cart abandonment rate·small business·Webstore·webstore conversion ratio
Yesterday, I wrote about a WSJ article on charge-back related fraud.
Later on, it occurred to me that some of the charge-backs by the customers may be unintentional, caused by the customer not recognizing the vendor name / transaction in the credit card statement. One of the stories in the article hints at such a possibility.
…two customers have asked for refunds when they claimed that charges on their credit cards didn’t belong to them. When he pointed to their IP address, both customers later discovered someone else in the household had made the order and allowed the charge to go through…
37signals, for example, claims to have reduced chargebacks by 30% just by making it easy for the customer to recognize the charge.
When someone buys something from us, this line item shows up on their credit card statement:
37signals-charge.com 800.xxx.xxxx IL
Visiting that URL takes you to this page where we explain the charge, the products, some suggestions if you don’t recognize the products, and a link to our billing support form someone needs additional help.
Here is an interesting article from Christian Holst on how to implement the 37signals solution for your webstore. The most interesting aspect of this solution is that it will cost you an afternoon of work and $10
Absolutely no reason to not implement this idea for your web-store.
Related Articles:
- 35% of fraud-related charges are charge backs
- Badcustomer.com – Legitimate? Appropriate?
Tags:37signals·charge-backs·ecommerce·fraud·save money·Webstore
Recently, I linked to an article by Darpan Munjal on what causes customers to leave your ecommerce site thus lowering your webstore conversion ratio. Here is another article from Practical ecommerce that lists 10 tips to improve the webstore conversion ratio.
Having a clutter-free, user-friendly website is also important to improve the site’s conversion ratio. I have observed that small business ecommerce merchants often ignore the importance of the site aesthetics, and usability. User interviews I have performed have shown that many users bounce from the website because they are “turned off” by the graphics and the look and feel. In a few cases, the users were confused about how to proceed on the site, and left the site even though they came in with an intention to buy.
A great book addressing this topic, almost a must read for anyone interested in website usability is Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”. It is an easy read and I highly recommend that book to anyone interested in website usability.
Here is another example of King Arthur Flour where streamlining the checkout process improved the conversion ratio by 17%. The changes they made to their webstore are -
- Reduced the number of steps to complete checkout to three from four
- Deleted the requirement for shoppers to choose between registered user and guest
- Added instant confirmations of shipping address information, which uses pop-up windows to prompt customers to insert their correct ZIP codes.
- Checkout page now immediately applies the value of gift cards and promotions to orders, enabling shoppers to see the final purchase price.
- Inserted a “buy more, save more” message on the cart page, that lets shoppers know the dollar value of merchandise they need to add to their cart to qualify for special offers. This will entice customers to round-up their purchases to a higher dollar value.
The last idea is very similar to the minimum-free-shipping-threshold approach that I discussed in another article. First calculate the average order size, and then set a free shipping threshold at 10% above the average order size. That will encourage customers to buy a few more items thus increasing the average order size.
Tags:conversion ratio·ecommerce·usability·Webstore
Lexiconn offers 6 tips to improve repeat customer buying on your webstore. With the technology tools available to the merchants, there is no excuse for not following the suggestions mentioned there. To quote from the article -
- Send a comprehensive email receipt upon receiving the order
- Send the tracking number once the order ships
- Request a product review a couple of days after the shipment is received
- Offer a coupon for a second purchase
- Automate all the tasks above
- Call the customer personally
Another tip I would like to add is -
- If you are selling products that have predictable lifecycle (eg,. coffee, chocolates, shampoo), and you can roughly predict how long it will take before the customer will want to buy the product again, then you should follow up via email around that time. This too can be achieved via automated tools like the one mentioned in the post. This idea is closely related to the point “Offer a coupon for a second purchase”, but does not have to be limited to first time buyers.
However, I strongly recommend that you always provide an “unsubscribe” link in every follow-up email that you send (emails unrelated to the order that has been placed). Else you risk annoying the customer thus resulting in lower customer satisfaction.
Tags:conversion·customer relationship management·repeat customer·Webstore
Great article by Darpan Munjal focusing on the customer experience of the webstore. It is really amazing how small usability improvements can raise the conversion rate.
15 Reasons Why Consumers Will Leave Your eCommerce Site
The main reasons higlighted in the article are -
- Poor usability of the web store – Requiring registration and asking unnecessary information from the customer. Poor categorization of products on the website. Unclear language on product description etc.
- Lack of product reviews – Or lack of credibility on the product reviews.
- Perceived lack of security on the website
Some of these are easy to fix and fixing them will greatly help improve the conversion ratio of your ecommerce webstore.
Tags:conversion ratio·ecommerce·small business·Webstore