advanced ideas

how to choose a shopping cart

When you're thinking of selling products online, you begin to realize just how many options you have. You could sell on eBay, Amazon, and even your own website. You could combine your efforts and sell on all of these at the same time. But, when you choose to sell on your own website, there are a number of obstacles and challenges you will encounter. You have to provide a safe shopping experience for your visitors. You need to adhere to safe practices and policies. And, you need a system that will be powerful enough and flexible enough to meet your unique needs. In this article, we compare an out-of-the-box system with our own ALG Cart.

Out-of-the-box carts

If anyone knows the frustration of using pre-made shopping carts like these, it's us. Now, there are some really good systems and some that we'll steer you away from every day of the week.

The Good
There are some very good carts out there, that we've actually used before. The two best cart systems we've used are Volusion and WordPress eCommerce. Both of these are flexible and allow for customization. However, when compared to the ALG Cart, these will have limitations when it comes to multi-brand structures like the one we built for M&M Products. This site could never have been built on any pre-made system. These two systems also have flaws when integrating with FedEx live rates.

The Bad
Anything that comes with your hosting company like OS Commerce or Miva Merchant is not worth the time or effort. Unless you just want to sell one or two products and don't really care too much about flexibility or customization, we recommend other systems.

The Ugly
Now, we've used these before many times. And, there are times you have to use them. But, PayPal and Google Merchant are probably the ugliest way to sell your products. The good thing about them, is that they are less expensive and can get you some results quickly. Remember, in most cases, you're sending the buyer away from your site to make their purchase. So, often, you'll lose the ability to track what they do once they leave.

The ALG Cart

Our own shopping cart has taken approximately 1 year to build. We've built this cart by combining all the good things we've loved about our custom carts over the years into one robust system. Our cart will rival most high-end systems out there. And, if you're looking for a cart that will handle FedEx integrated shipping, ours is the best cart you can choose. We know, because we've literally built our cart around FedEx and the need for live rates on products.

ALG Cart Features

• Unlimited Categories and Products
• Multiple Image Toggle Viewer
• Product Tags For Search Engines
• Friendly URLs
• Fast MySQL Query Structure
• Easy Integration with Authorize.net, PayPal, and Google Merchant
• FedEx, UPS, and Custom Shipping Integration
• Package Shipping Management for Variant Shipping Options
• Customer Loyalty Program Manager
• Products Specials Manager
• Complete User Management
• Customizable and Flexible (we can add other features as you need them)
  
  If you need help with your next website development project, contact us.

By: Deric Hicks,
Senior Web Applications Engineer, ALG