My pick of shopping carts to start an online business

[ecterra]

The most important consideration when wanting to implement an online shop is to pick the right shopping cart... and the most important feature of any shopping cart is how easy is it to insert products for you to sell (as well as other contents) .. leave the design, look and feel portion to professionals.. leave the infrastructure section (domain, hosting, installation) to professionals..... at the end of the day it is the store owner that has to manage and administer the shop.. adding and deleting products etc etc... so that is why being able to easily insert content is key.

In term of this feature my pick are ..

1) ZenCart
2) OpenCart
3) Magento
4) TomatoCart
5) Prestashop
6) XCart


What are your picks and why ???.. do share

For ready-to-use, infrastructure ready, pre-configured shopping cart implementations, do head on to http://www.ecterra.com

[JohanvW]

I vote OC. Yes, there is questions being asked about Daniel and so on but considering it all, it seems to be the most user friendly atm. anyway.

[IanF]

One major problem for me with opencart is the stock either you can sell from stock or not. We have some products that we cut to order and others which we stock. Now we can put stock in for everything but then customers see that and want to come pick up straight away. With prestsashop you can set this per item. So we will have a look at moving to Prestashop.

[IanF]

We finally switched to prestashop
Paperkutz
It helped that my daughter who has just finished her BSc IT degree had time to do 99% of the work.
There is a discount of 15% on sales of over R300 if you use the checkout code PAPERKUTZ, valid until 9th December.
Let me know what you think!
I think it is blinged a lot better than the old opencart store, what do you think?

[Pap_sak]

Ian looks great - I looked at your old site ages ago when you had just launched and see you have added lots of products. Also like all the color options. In your opinion, how many unique visits do you need per actual sale? i am working on 1 sale per 100 south african visists - but would like to know if that is reasonable.

[IanF]

Pap sak,
I have never looked at stats like that, but my gut feel says it probably closer to 300 visits per sale.
With the laser there is a lot more you can do so it is easy to make new products.
We have just found out how to make a wooden hinge out of a flat sheet of wood.

[Pap_sak]

Hi Ian - cheers for that. Do you use http://www.google.com/analytics/ ? Very powerfull stats, even down to which province and which city visitors are coming from. I used to be a fan of awstats but these days google knocks them out the water. Pretty easy to set up as well.

[ecterra]

Hi Ian, great looking site Paperkutz. Prestashop is indeed a powerful shopping cart application minus the complexity for users.

Hi pap_sak, when considering sales to unique visitor ratio we use a very conservative approach of 3% out of the 10% of the total unique visitors.
Google Analytics is great however I opt for PIWIK which is an open source analytic tool. You can set and track ecommerce goals with piwik easily.

[stevefridel]

Online shopping cart is very important software for shopping. This software is also used to develop your business and you can also use this cart for purchasing some best product online. This cart is very important to starting new online business.

[OldGoat]

The simplest one to set up and get going with is www.ecwid.com
Still "playing" with it but so far, so good.