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How to Pick an Online ECommerce Shopping Cart: 6 Carts Reviewed

A more recent version of this article has been posted at SitePoint, which also has links to related articles that might be of interest. The SitePoint article also has a review of Google Checkout.

Selling online can be a great way to expand an existing business or start a new one. Sites like eBay and etsy let you sell within their sites and use their shopping carts. You benefit from their traffic and marketing but they control the look and functionality of their site. The other option is to sell through your own website.

To do so, you need a shopping cart, payment processing, and a process to fulfill orders. This article deals mostly with carts but generally mentions how you might handle payments and other cart-related issues. It is assumed you know how to find and deliver a product to customers.

For this article, I tested six shopping carts using two pages from an ecommerce site one of my clients’ runs. The carts mentioned here are not the only carts available, for example, Yahoo! and Squirrelcart (which has my favorite mascot). And it is possible you will need a custom shopping cart built or a cart customized from software like Magento.

However, the method I use to evaluate these carts can be used to evaluate any shopping cart. Ultimately, it is your online business.

Where to Start?

When a client asks me to help them find a shopping cart, I often start with the feature lists from different cart vendors. It helps my clients focus on what they need. That winnowing process, in turn, helps us focus on whether or not they need a simple cart or a regular cart. If they need a regular cart, using a feature list helps figure out whether they need a basic cart or something more complex.

At the same time my client and I look through the feature list, I work with them to understand exactly what they want to accomplish online. Is the online business their entire business or an extension? Does the shopping cart need to integrate with their accounting system, for example, QuickBooks? What are their products and how complex are their products, for example, will they offer quantity discounts?

There are other important cart features to test. Can customers see their order status online? Can you easily edit all outbound emails used to confirm sales, notify customers when a product is shipped, and so on? If your online business has several employees, can you restrict the reporting to just your client? How hard is it to add options to products?

Another great question is how is credit card data stored in the database? Credit card processing companies have strict rules about storing card data. My advice: avoid storing any important customer data. Let payment processing services handle that risk.

Simple Carts

If you have only a few products to sell, or you want to test the waters, then you have two options for selling online. One option is to use an existing site such as eBay, Half.com, etsy, or similar site. For example, my wife sells all our spare books on Half.com because it makes no sense to bother with anything more complicated.

Your second option, when you have only a few items to sell, is to use the payment processing capabilities of another online service, for example, Paypal or Mal’s Ecommerce. This works especially well if you have a website that already exists. Both these simple carts let you use their site to configure your products then copy and paste button code into your web pages. The code creates a button on your web page that, when clicked, sends the site visitor through their service for payment.
Here’s how it works using a product from one of my clients:

Paypal

http://www.paypal.com

PayPal is an online payment processor, currently owned by eBay, that processes credit cards as well as transactions members make within their private network. Most people know of the private network payments and don’t realize that PayPal also handles payments through major credit cards as well as electronic checks.

To use PayPal as a cart, you’ll need to register with them. This involves setting up a PayPal account then adding a bank account to your account. To validate your bank account, PayPal deposits small amounts into your account, say 11 cents, and you log in and tell them the amount they deposited.

To create a product within your PayPal account, select the Products and Services tab on your main account page, then the Website Payments Standard link on the Products and Services page. This takes you to a Buy Now Buttons page. Select the type of payment button you want then follow the directions to work with their Button Factory. You’ll see a chunk of code at the end of the process that you’ll paste into your website. It is a fairly easy 1-3 web page process to create a button or email link to a product you sell.
PayPal currently charges 1.9-2.9% of transaction cost plus 30 cents USD per transaction. There are no monthly fees and no setup costs. They provide detailed accounting for anything sold using their Buy Now buttons.

Support for PayPal is by help text, email, and phone. They’re a large organization and it can take time to get a proper response. But the response typically is thorough.
In my experience with a non-profit group that uses PayPal buttons to let their members pay for meetings, the only criticism is that the PayPal payment page makes it very hard to use major credit cards. The most obvious part of the payment page is the login box. It’s only when you notice a small image of credit cards and a Continue link that users realize they don’t have to log in to PayPal to pay with a credit card.

I would note one thing about PayPal. While I have heard complaints over many years about their service, so far it has never happened to me. My recommendation with any shopping cart or payment processing service is to ask around. Ask the vendor for references. If they have testimonials on their websites, try to contact the person who gave them a quote.

Mal’s Ecommerce

http://www.mals-e.com

Another shopping cart that lets you create buttons and handle processing remotely is Mal’s Ecommerce. They are a 10 year old company based in Spain. Mal’s offers a lot of functionality in a simple easy to use service. They offer both free and paid premium carts, depending upon what features you need. And they have a bit of software you can download to manage your orders processed through their service.

To use Mal’s you need to set up an account. On their main account page, you’ll see a Cart Setup tab. Click that tab to open a page that provides links to define your products, payment methods, and cart behavior. You can, for example, add a logo on the payment pages your customers will use. Like PayPal, it is fairly easy to figure out how to set up different options.

Mal’s offers a fairly robust set of features for a simple cart. For example, you can set discounts, email notifications, shipping methods and costs, downloadable products, gift vouchers, and other features. They also have a broad range of payment process from different parts of the world.

The cost for Mal’s? Free. Their service depends on heavy users who pay for the Premium service who in turn funds the free carts. They don’t charge a cost per transaction, no monthly fees for the free cart, and no setup charges.

Support for Mal’s Ecommerce is primarily through an extensive set of documentation that is well written and task-oriented. You can email them but they ask that you use the help text and the forums first as most questions are answered there. But you knew that already since that is best practice for any software.

Regular Shopping Carts

If your online business is a new one or an extension of an existing business, chances are good that a regular shopping cart is required. You do not want to manually manage product quantities, discounts, out of stock, orders, shipping, and all the rest.

In addition to having the option of a regular cart or a more complex cart, you also have the option to install the cart yourself or use a third party service like Monster.com or CoreCommerce.com. Installation on your server gives you ultimate control but you’re also responsible to secure the database, upgrade the software, and all the rest.

Third party services solve those problems but introduce others. For example, a client of mine uses Monster.com but it costs too much, the interface is quirky, and pages load very slowly at times. However, my client does not want the hassle or responsibility of installing and maintaining a shopping cart on their server.

Shopping Carts on Your Server

The two install it yourself shopping carts I am most familiar with are Zen Cart and digiShop. Zen Cart is free and open source while digiShop is from a private software company. They offer similar capabilities but can be quite different in actual use.

Zen Cart

http://www.ZenCart.com

The first install it yourself shopping cart you might look at is Zen Cart, an open source cart that is an offshoot of osCommerce. In my experience, Zen Cart (and osCommerce) benefit from the same strengths, for example, a strong online community and lots of modules to extend the shopping cart functionality. However, they also share the same weaknesses, mostly too much code to wade through to make changes to templates.
Installing Zen Cart is fairly easy. You upload their files using FTP software, set up a database and the database username and password, and then call up their installation page in a web browser. You also will have to set permissions on several folders and files, too.

Once Zen Cart is installed, the administration area makes it fairly easy to create products and categories. The installation process also lets you load the database with sample data so that you can become comfortable with the cart as you load in your own products.

Creating templates is somewhat more complicated. There are a handful of templates that can be changed to reflect your page design. However, editing a template requires carefully maintaining PHP conditionals and other code. It’s fairly easy to break. And, like most carts, there are dozens of templates that control the center content area of the cart. These templates are named in a fairly easy to understand way. Finding a specific template to tweak a design should not be hard.

Support for Zen Cart is through their website, through the forums, wiki, and tutorials. The few times I used the support forum, and when I searched the forums for answers, I got great results.

The price of Zen Cart software is free. However, as with any install it yourself software, you will pay for either your time to set up and configure or time from an expert in HTML, CSS, and PHP.

digiShop

http://digishop.sumeffect.com

The digiShop cart is the best software I have found for less than a thousand dollars (US). While there are other carts in the price range, and more expensive carts, digiShop is fairly easy to use and, therefore, is a good cart to discuss and compare with other carts.
Like Zen Cart, installing digiShop is relatively easy. You upload your files and set up a database with a database username and password. Then you open your browser, call up their installation web page, and follow directions. You even can avoid the hassle of installation by hiring them for $45 (USD) to do the installation for you on your server.

Once installed, digiShop is fairly easy to use. The only negative for me is the large number of top level links, although each link is clearly separate from the others. Creating products is simple: click the Products tab then the Add a Product button. You can easily add variants, a couple types of description, for example, blurb and full description.

digiShop also integrates with a number of payment processors as well as at least one affiliate software program. There’s also the ability to integrate with QuickBooks, StoneEdge, Google Analytics, and eBay. And digiShop also integrates with the company’s other products, for example, chatFuse for live chat and fireBlast to leverage the email addresses collected from your buyers to do email marketing. But those products are priced separately.

Adding your page design to digiShop is fairly easy. There are two sets of header and footer templates, a set used for secure pages and another set for pages delivered without an SSL certificate. You use your page design and drop in small single line bits of PHP code, then upload the four files to the templates folder. If you need to modify the content areas of the carts, their template file names are fairly obvious. digiShop also provides an online widget that will do the conversion from your page design to their templates.

Based on installing software for over 10 years, what I appreciate most about digiShop is that its file structure and code are very clean and easy to understand. This makes maintenance much easier, for example, to find and tweak templates. And while I cannot prove it, my theory is that well-coded clean software indicates the software programmer(s) had a clear goal in mind when they created their product. Messy software, in my experience, usually means the product has been left to grow like a weed.
Support for digiShop, based on two or three years experience on behalf of my clients, is relatively quick and at the right level of detail. They have an online knowledge base which is helpful. But the best support has been through email.

Costs for digiShop vary depending on which version of their software you buy. If you don’t need many features, their simpler version works fine for $299 (USD). The two versions with more features cost $349 (USD) and $799 (USD).

Hosted Third Party Shopping Carts

If you do not want the bother or risk to install and maintain a shopping cart on your web server, the other option is to use a hosted service. Unlike eBay or etsy, with a hosted cart you can use your own page design and URL.

Monster Commerce

http://www.monstercommerce.com

Monster is part of the domain registrar Network Solutions. It appears to be in the midst of migrating to a more cleaned up and modern interface. Whether old or new, however, they provide a broad range of cart functionality, for example, the ability to handle variants and map quantities to each type of variant. If you sell a shirt in three sizes, you can set prices for each size shirt and track quantities as they’re sold.

To set up your page design in Monster, you select the HTML and Layout links on the left side of the old interface, the Design tab on their new interface. There are many design sub options. However, for example, in their older interface, it should be fairly obvious that the HTML for the top of your pages is pasted into the Top of Page HTML Editor page. The Layout options are primarily settings that you define for your cart overall, for example, color schemes.

The Monster cart comes with a variety of buttons used through the checkout process. You can add your own set, however, if you sign up for their Pro package. That involves using their FTP editor to create a folder where all the other buttons reside, then uploading all your versions of their buttons.

Adding products in the Monster cart is done through the Inventory link. The Products sub option makes it fairly easy to add details about each product, including variants, images, and other details. Tracking inventory, price discounts, gift certificates and other product related details are also available within the Inventory options.

There are a lot of online tutorials to help with setting up your cart in Monster. Their telephone and phone support also has been excellent, especially at odd hours on the weekends and holidays when I have called for clients.

Prices for Monster are $49.99 per month (USD) and $99.99 per month (USD). The higher price lets you use your own interface design.

CoreCommerce

http://www.corecommerce.com

If you like the digiShop cart but do not want the bother of hosting a shopping cart, CoreCommerce.com is the online version of digiShop with extra features. It also makes a good alternative to consider with Monster Cart. Because Core Commerce is the digiShop Pro version offered as a hosted service, setting up products and performing other tasks are identical to digiShop.

Adding your site design to Core Commerce is as easy as their standalone digiShop software. You create header and footer pages from your page design, add a few single line bits of code, then FTP them to their server. For the content areas of the cart, you are limited to using CSS to style the checkout form and other bits that appear in the center of a shopping cart. Unlike a standalone cart, you can’t go in and tweak the code for the signup form or other center elements.

With regular shopping carts, it is critical to test how easy or difficult it is to add your website design to cart pages. digiShop software makes it fairly easy to accomplish. Templates typically divide into two groups, one set for layout of the cart web page and then a set of templates for individual elements of the cart pages, for example, the login screen or payment detail form.

Prices for Core Commerce run from $39.95 per month (USD) to $99.95 per month (USD). The higher price adds more bandwidth and server storage space.

Custom Shopping Carts

Beyond regular shopping carts are custom shopping carts. These carts are either created from scratch by a programmer who then sells their cart to their client base or customized based upon an existing cart, for example, Magento.

My default recommendation is to work through feature lists, as well as careful research and analysis of client needs, before you tackle custom shopping carts. Be sure you cannot get the features you need from something that already exists. Be sure a small compromise on your part doesn’t commit you to considerable expense.

If you cannot find what you need off the shelf, you should proceed carefully. For example, get solid references for the programmer or agency that will create your shopping cart. When you talk to references, be sure to ask how the programmer handled changes: did they get snippy and rude or did they dig in and force the client to clearly describe what was needed?

Also, insist the code for your cart is thoroughly documented within the code. That will make it easier for you to take your cart to another programmer or agency. Even if you are thrilled with or married to the programmer, documenting code makes it much easier to maintain your cart in the future.

Finally, with custom carts, it is important that software development happen in a structured way. Your requirements, for example, should be written down and all questions and testing should refer to specific requirements. The programmer should set up a test bed where the cart can be built out and tested without affecting any live production cart. You also should ask to confirm the programmer or agency uses tools to store the code, keep track of any changes to the code, and help maintain code over time.

These are all basic software programming practices but you should still ask. A “no” to any of these questions, or “I don’t need a public test bed” or “We don’t document our code” should be signs to go elsewhere.

Search Optimization and Shopping Carts

Whatever cart you choose, optimizing your online store for search engines is critical. With simple carts like PayPal and Mal’s, of course, you must optimize the pages on your website: they handle only the payment processing. With regular shopping carts, however, you should have, at the least:

• The ability to control the HTML page title as well as the page title that appears within the content on the page.
• The ability to control at least the URL file name for each of your product catalog and detail pages, if not also the file folder path to that file name.
• The ability, of course, to modify meta tags, image title and alt CSS tags, and the words used within your links.

I would argue that the ability to output your shopping site as a site map, to then submit and upload through Google’s Webmaster Tools, also is key for search optimization. And some carts let you export your products as a list for shopping comparison sites.

One approach that I’ve used with some of my clients for search optimization is to publish their product catalog and detail pages as static web pages. This gives them 100% control of what is on every single page. They let their shopping cart manage the orders and payments. Other clients of mine let the shopping cart do everything. Both groups do well so I assume what works is a matter of your personal preference.

Some Final Thoughts on Shopping Carts

Hopefully this article has managed to avoid a flame war about who makes the best shopping cart. It really depends on your needs and preferences. Here are a few quick issues to also consider when you pick a shopping cart:

• If you use an install it yourself shopping cart, check what server control panel is used. One control panel, Plesk, divides the server space into two halves, a secure half with pages that are served through an SSL connection and the other half for pages that are delivered through normal http traffic. If your server has Plesk, be aware that configuring your cart may require a few extra steps.
• Be sure to develop a backup plan for your orders, customer list, templates, and settings.
• Be sure to look up online website monitoring services that will periodically ping your online store and email or text you when your site is down.
• If you can avoid storing credit card data in your cart database, the better your security.
• If you use Mal’s or PayPal, be sure to look into their chargeback policies and costs.

Finally, some hosted carts offer SafeHacker and similar validation that an online store is secure. This clearly is a preference issue. My view is that it is good if it helps your customers feel comfortable enough to buy. These services also can keep you honest by pinpointing any security issues before you find them the hard way.

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