My first eCommerce mentor used to tell "You are only as good as your shopping cart." He was a wise man. Yes, your payment processor is typically the most important aspect in your online business, they deal with your money and without a solid, secure, and honest merchant account provider that will stand up for their clients, you could find yourself knee deep in charge backs or come to discover you may be missing a payout. In a broader view, your shopping cart actually is your business; it is essentially your storefront, inventory, and shipping system all in one. This is often times overlooked and many companies will choose the first cart they see and then realize they must upgrade to something better and this is typically very painstaking to remedy.
There are a plethora of shopping carts to choose from and many of them, even the expensive ones, just do not cut it. This article will outline the shopping carts web designers and payment processors tend to recommend to their clients. I have outlined a few of the most important features which every shopping cart should be able to do and all of the shopping carts listed below contain these features:
· Inventory/product management
· CM or customer management
· Shipping modules
· Order receipt emails
· Easy SSL integration for added security
OSCommerce
OSCommerce is one of the most widely used and well known open source, free shopping carts. It is very simple but very powerful at the same time, most payment processors integrate quite easily with OSCommerce. Because it has been around for so long and it is open source, it has by far the most add-ons, contributions, and modifications available. It is recommended that you seek out modifications which can further help run your cart as OSCommerce tends to lack some of the more powerful features. Sadly, installing these mods can be time consuming and difficult to the point where you may need outside help. Additionally it is difficult to customize OSCOmmerce templates. Read Full Story
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