OK hands up who’s ever thought setting up a credible e-commerce site was complicated and expensive.
The good news is that it does not have to be that way. There is in existence such things as open source software. Open source software is FREE and has become a very credible first step into e-commerce. Open source shopping carts have evolved immensely in the last few years and are now as feature rich as they are prolific. The mechanisms to accept online payments have become many and varied as well with the average person now able to accept credit/debit card payments on their site within a few minutes of setting it up.
Having decided to set up an online enterprise myself just over a year ago, and knowing nothing about creating a website let alone anything about shopping carts i decided to jump into the deep end and try it out… 12 months later, i think i have now tried most open source shopping carts that are widely available today. Some are so easy to set up that it can be done by most people of average intelligence with their eyes closed. Some are easy but offer very limited functionality and some.. well just avoid them unless you want nightmares and long nights sat in front of your PC trying to set up and configure clunky, janky and often broken software!
What i’m not going to do is review every single bit of software that i have tried because there are so many and instead just focus on the ones i thought actually served the purpose the best.
The next thing to mention is that there are 2 ways to approach online commerce, one by having a proper online store with integrated shopping cart and the other is by including ‘Buy Now’ buttons in your own website. I have tried both, and personally prefer the first option. If your looking for simply buttons the best place in my opinion to look is Paypal. Buttons are easy to implement and just involve a copy and paste of HTML code into your webpage source code.
So what criteria need looking at when choosing an e-commerce shopping cart?
- online payments.. how many? which types?
- is it easy to customise?
- support? how good is it?
- is it visually appealing?
- what kind of SEO capabilities does it include?
OScommerce
The first i tried was called oscommerce. This is considered to be the origional useable open source e-commerce store software in its class and like many requires your hosting server to also be running mySQL which a database on the server and is quite common anyway. As with most ecommerce stores it needs to be uploaded using FTP. Although it sounds scary if you have never done it before, it’s not actually.. it’s so simple a baby could do it. You will however need a FTP Upload Client (software) and the simplest and FREE FTP client available in my humble opinion is the Filezilla FTP Client.
Being several months since i tried it, i still have mixed feelings about oscommerce. It is very and the most customisable of all the products tried and even comes with a huge downloadable manual with about every feature and customisation in exceptional detail outlined. It looks old and tired in it’s basic form and although there are literally hundreds of templates and mods available on the internet, given that i started getting warning messages that their were compatibility issues with the webhost’s server i decided it was time to move on.
Cubecart
The next on the list on good useable e-commerce shops was Cubecart. Cubecart installed with no problems at all and was up and running in no time. It took some time to figureout where the header image was located in order to use my own but it is now sorted (tip: it’s in the skins>killer>background images folder and called topheader.gif, assuming you are using the killer skin of course!)
Cubecart has a good range of payment options including the likes of paypal and Nochex that don’t require you to have a business bank account, and they are all as you would expect easy to configure. There also a good range of templates available both free and paid for, Visit a working Cubecart store running the killer theme.
Opencart
Last but by no means least on the list of shopping carts is Opencart, and this really is my favourite of all the easier and simple to use e-commerce shopping carts. It installs faster and easier than Cubecart, It is even easier to configure and i think looks better in it’s basic form than Cubecart. As with the other 2 there are a wide range of add-ons. I would particularly advise getting the Nochex payments add-on and the google base add-on from the Qphoric|Domain website, one is $5 and the other $7 but well worth it as are the many opencart free and paid for add-on’s to be found there. Visit a working Opencart Store. One thing Opencart has that Cubecart does not is the ability to utilise coupons in your checkout process and that can be a very useful tool in your marketing strategy later. The products page also have as standard customer reviews and cross-promotion of your products.
The SEO aspects of Opencart are also far better than it’s competitors which will ultimately determine whether you get to the front page of Google results or remain buried in with millions of other websites in the results, Within only a few days my site was starting to rank well within the top half a dozen results for a number of keywords and picking up sales from within a couple of hours of going live.
Conclusion
You can get a e-commerce site online very quickly, easily and cheaply. My advice is do it! if you don’t at least try, you will never know.