Security requirements may change. For that reason, open-source solutions especially need to be regularly patched and updated. This is almost always done manually by developers. With a hosted shopping cart , updates are performed automatically by the vendor.
Note that you may need to configure any new features before taking advantage of them. How do you find a solution that promotes, rather than hinders, your growth? Here are five steps to help you figure that out. The decision to sell online is a big one. To do that, start with why. Why do you want to sell online? But how exactly do you plan to make this happen?
Apart from the baseline goals, think in terms of ecommerce metrics. Based on your set goals and metrics, create a list of features your ecommerce website needs. These should be closely aligned with your customer lifecycle. For example, a local small business may not need to support multiple currencies, but this will be a crucial feature for a cross-border retailer.
The easiest way to determine what shopping cart features you need is to work from general to specific. As described above, hosted SaaS shopping carts and self-hosted open source both have their merit. But each choice also comes with certain compromises. Open source and custom ecommerce website development can carry with it extra risks.
In the end, we wound up spending a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a platform that nearly sunk our business. On the other hand, SaaS solutions pose some constraints to customization. This can limit some aspects of your ability to customize the functionality of your store. Be sure to look into what options are available for custom development via APIs if you have specific needs. Checkout is a critical step for conversion. Is the solution you are looking at user-friendly?
Baymard Institute runs an ongoing assessment of ecommerce UX checkout and strengthens the importance of following these best practices:. Use these points to assess how your top choices scored. Also, check if you can customize checkout settings and microcopy to decrease cart abandonment rates. But if some critical part of your ecommerce site breaks, the last thing your team wants is to read pages of technical docs in search of answers.
But fast response time and multiple support channels are not a given with all vendors. So do check how each one stacks up. BigCommerce is an Open SaaS platform provider offering hosted shopping cart software as part of its all-in-one ecommerce platform, packed with other value-added features such as a drag-and-drop website builder, store management tools, pre-built integrations with popular business systems and an array of ready-to-use apps.
WooCommerce is a popular self-hosted shopping cart for WordPress websites. Developed and maintained by Automattic, WooCommerce has a decent starter selection of essential ecommerce features for checkout. Extra payment integrations e. And you can pick up free and paid extensions from their app marketplace to further augment your online store. The disadvantage is that many must-have shopping cart features such as single-page checkout, abandoned cart recovery and discounts are not available natively unlike the hosted solutions such as BigCommerce.
Site design is controlled by themes and there is a wide array of available themes from multiple providers. Themeforst currently has themes available for a reasonable price and opencart. The content management system is very professional with a modern look and has all of the major features that a small-business owner could need including complex shipping options, order and customer management, coupons and more.
ZenCart is free and open source and is a derivative of the open source osCommerce project. ZenCart took the core of osCommerce back in and updated it with a more robust CSS based layout system. Since it is truly open source software, users are free to download and install it, as well as completely customize it, rewrite the code, and really do anything to the software that you want. The standard front-end template is a typical three column design with page links across the header, categories down the left side, and additional links on the right.
The basic design seems very dated and is based on a template that comes predesigned with the software. The content management system can be very confusing. Product pages are lengthy with an enormous amount of options with little attempt to show site owners only what they need to see. There are very few pre-build extensions available in the online community.
In fact, CodeCanyon currently shows only 5 extensions available. If you read the descriptions above, you will notice that there is very little difference between the major ecommerce options.
So which one is better? It scales up to handle large loads but it can get very expensive, very quickly. Overall, most business owners are best suited with WooCommerce. WordPress is the number one content management system for a reason, it is secure, easy to use, and has literally thousands of available plug-ins to expand to your business needs.
Secondly, you can quickly pick a design for your website by choosing from dozens of templates available. Style and personalize it however you want and configure the necessary things you need for setting up your shop in no time.
The only sweat is in adding your products to the site , uploading the images , selecting the payment and shipment options and making sure that your website is rich with compelling content. Thirdly, there is no need to overpay for your server — you pay a monthly subscription fee for the time you want your website to run. The constant security of your site includes a lot of updating and research.
There is no need to be bothered with it anymore - you can trust the work of professionals. Finally, by choosing a shopping cart , you receive an enormous amount of customer support. By managing a large number of shopping cart websites, companies get those bugs easily fixed for you. Now that we have determined the benefits of using hosted shopping carts to grow your business, look at some of the core features that will allow you to successfully sell your products on the Internet.
If you strive for a perfect balance between the convenience of setting up and having control over your website , then, Shopify is the best platform on the market.
It is highly valued in the community to provide as much control as possible before opening your server. If you are a small business owner, the first thing you will notice about Shopify is their large support base , which offers you a great variety of tools to alter your store.
Another great thing is the presence of their AppStore , where you can find useful plugins for creating and customizing your website. Despite all of its great features, Shopify lacks the content - marketing feature, which has become a big deal on the market. It is only with content marketing you can double your conversion rate thanks to customers becoming more educated about your products and therefore, more willing to buy it.
You should sign up for their free trial and see whether this hosted cart solution is the right fit for you. Among other shopping carts , o pen c art has been very prominent for gaining immense popularity on the market.
Clients appreciate opencart for the top-notch security protocols that do not allow any of your data to get lost, while keeping track of any activity on the website. Another great benefit is the availability of content marketing and SEO -optimization for any article you post about the product. For the price you pay, you will also get an official forum that allows you to avoid any obstacles in creating your website and receive a quick support response.
The platform is flexible and very easy to use. It can be adapted to any web-hosting and provides a perfect and inexpensive solution for all your e-commerce needs. New and bright templates , various marketing tools , great SEO make PinnacleCart a very good choice for an online-only shop.
To close off this section, a pro tip — try to use as few pieces of software as you can. If possible, buy only an ecommerce solution or a shopping cart Like Shopify — if you get both, you may have to deal with the headache of software integration.
Ecommerce software typically has some native integrations with third-party shopping carts, so you should come across few to no problems when pairing them. However, incompatibilities are still possible, especially if the software gets updated frequently. Another reason to buy only one solution is that you will have to manage only one database.
Unless your software allows you to import your own databases, you will be forced to use whatever database storage solution each software provider uses. Managing one database is a big challenge enough — managing two is double the headache.
Finally, you will just save money with one piece of software. These costs include shipping, taxes, or whatever other costs may be incurred in addition to the price of the product. This is very important because unexpected costs that show up only in the shopping cart are among the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment.
Display all the shipping or tax cost information right on the product page. Many people use shopping carts as a wish list of sorts — they may fill their carts with items and come back to them weeks or months later. Well, once people do come back, they should be reminded that they have items in their shopping carts. Display the order total detailing all costs as well. This will help people quickly review their cart before purchasing.
Internet users have a lot of accounts on various websites and platforms these days, and adding one more to that already huge list is a big thing to ask. Some shopping cart solutions may have such functionality built-in, but you may use third-party plugins as well. Optimize your website as well to make sure that there are no annoying performance hiccups. After payment, offer people to sign up as well again to simplify their future purchasing process.
Strongly consider investing in security badges as well like McAfee Secure or Better Business Bureau Accreditation Seal — these increase trust and make visitors feel safer on your website. Integrate as many secure gateways as you can — this will allow people to avoid having to sign up for new payment services, as well as will ensure that people in other countries have payment options.
Repeating our example from earlier, if a visitor has a game console in their cart, then show a compatible videogame, headset, or gamepad. But if there are many products on your website, you will have to resort to recommendation algorithms. Hopefully, after reading our post, you know exactly which shopping cart solution would be perfect for you!
Remember to check the features of the desired shopping cart application and ideally purchase a solution that provides exactly what you need — no more and no less. I would recommend here Shopify especially if you do dropshipping. Discuss available options with your team too — they might provide you with more useful insight into the challenges and benefits of each available solution.
Please Share If you Like it : 40 Shares. Table of Contents. Best Shopping Cart Software Pros: Unlimited pages, products, and templates for all plans. Affiliate management functionality starting from the Scale plan. Cons: Pretty pricey.
The Launch plan has limited functionality. Will get pretty expensive once the lifetime access offer expires. No free trials — only a day money-back guarantee. Pricing Shift4shop offers 4 plans:. All in all, Shift4Shop starts very inexpensively, even if you can't use the free plan. The features are largely similar across all plans.
A whopping 4 plans to choose from. Cons: No free trials — only a day money-back guarantee. Free plan available to US merchants only. Pricing Ecwid offers 4 pricing plans:. So Ecwid is a good fit for sellers from these countries as well. Pros: Pretty cheap. The free plan is good for starters. Your own shopping app for visitors in the annual Unlimited plan.
Supports a huge number of payment gateways. Cons: Very limited functionality in the free plan. Unlike many other solutions, imposes limits on the number of products in most plans. Pricing WooCommerce is an open-source shopping cart solution and is completely free. The latter two are perhaps the most interesting. There even is the Affirm add-on that allows you to accept credit-based payments! Pros: Allows you to design a store from scratch.
Excellent for new businesses. Built specifically for WordPress. Completely free and open-source. Hundreds of official extensions for improved functionality. Huge number of payment gateways including region-specific ones. Cons: If you need to purchase add-ons, you may have to spend a lot of money on setup. Pricing Shopify offers 3 main plans:. Pros: Ecommerce website or blog creation features.
The features from plan to plan are largely similar. Offers integrated POS services for physical stores. Has payment gateways for pretty much any country in the world. Cons: The price gap between the plans is pretty large. Relatively weak reporting functionality in low-tier plans. Rather hefty transaction fees. Pricing Like WooCommerce, Magento is a fully open-source and free shopping cart software. Pros: Just like WooCommerce, but for larger businesses.
Open-source and free. Thousands of free and paid add-ons. A huge number of payment gateways. Cons : More difficult to set up than hosted solutions. Requires more technical knowledge than WooCommerce. Pricing AbanteCart is open-source and completely free.
Very functional even without extensions. Expandable functionality via extensions. Paid extensions are rather cheap. Cons: Not as polished as other open-source platforms. Limited functionality compared to WooCommerce.
More difficult setup than in hosted software. Pricing PrestaShop is yet another piece of open-source, completely free software. All-in-one ecommerce solution. Thousands of extensions available. Cons: Unlike WooCommerce, needs to be self-hosted. Here are the available plans:. In contrast, the Free Edition comes with free core upgrades. Only the Ultimate plan has support included in the price. As X-Cart claims, this piece of software easily handles k monthly visitors!
Pros : All-in-one ecommerce software. Has a free version along with several paid plans. Suitable for large businesses that want scalability, reliability, and top-notch support. Dozens of integrations and add-ons. X-Cart also offers a web hosting service. Cons: Very pricey. Rather convoluted pricing scheme.
Unlike other subscription-based solutions, has support behind a paywall. Pros : Full ecommerce platform. Offers a hosted option with a day free trial. Unlimited products and categories.
Inbuilt affiliate management system. Cons : The non-cloud variant will require manual installation on a web server. Pricing PinnacleCart is available in hosted and self-hosted variants.
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