It is very important to study your needs before choosing a shopping cart software, first question you need to answer is; do you need to host and mange your shopping cart ? Or managed one will better solution for you.
Fully managed shopping carts:
There are tens of providers those offer fully managed online stores which includes; hosting and payment getaway, you only need to register a domain name and point it to their DNS in order to get your shopping cart to work, you will get also a friendly back end where you will be able to manage your store (add/remove categories and products). Example:
Starting from $25/month you can have your store up and running (no setup fee)
The advantages of this solution:
1- There is no software purchase required (some software cost more than $1000)
2- You do not need web hosting as it will be included within your package.
3- You do not need to worry about security, upgrades and maintenance.
4- Payment getaway is included; you can accept credit cards and Paypal without paying extra subscription fee.
5- You do not need to purchase SSL certificate, all transactions/signups will be going under your provider’s secure connection area.
6- The front end theme of your shopping cart is fully editable; any developer with some HTLM knowledge can create a new theme for your site.
7- Some companies like Yahoo will provide you with a badge shows that your store is powered by Yahoo which will encourage people to buy from your store.
The disadvantages of the fully managed shipping cart:
1- You have less control over your source code, in some cases if you are running a big store you may need add complicated modules that require changes on the source code level which you do not have access to in this case.
2- The checkout page will be run under the provider domain (i.e. payment.yahoo.com), so you will have less control over it.
Self hosted and managed shopping cart:
To run a shopping cart yourself you need to have a shopping cart software, find a reliable web host, install the shopping cart and customize it, you can hire a developing company to do all that for your but that still self hosted and managed as you need to keep paying the developing company on monthly basis.
Examples for shopping cart software:
OScommerce
Zen Cart
Xcart
Magento
The advantages of hosting and managing your shopping cart:
1- Full control over your source code, you can do any changes, add feature, install modules and even restructure the database.
2- Enjoy a huge collection of themes available for these shopping carts which will save you significant amount of money required to customize the look and feel of your store.
The advantages of hosting and managing your shopping cart:
1- You will be responsible for monitor your server, upgrade, updates and security, otherwise you need to keep a contentious relationship with your web developing company and pay them on monthly basis to do that for you (expect $100/month fee)
2- Shopping cart software require high performing servers, shared hosting will not be enough to run them with high performance, you will need at least virtual private server (VPS) with starting cost of $40/month
3- You will need to install a SSL certificate (extra cost) that also requires a dedicated IP (extra cost)
4- You need to install a payment getaway if you want to process credit cards on your site (that will cost you =$30/month, approval will be required), have not said that you can use third party solutions (Paypal and Google Check out) without any additional cost.
If you think it is not an easy choice for you then do not worry you can change back and forth anytime, all shopping carts have export/import features using CSV files, switching back and forth will not be a very hard task.
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