There are many factors that should be considered when choosing an online shopping cart solution. Many shopping carts are available for free, some you must purchase a license for, and others can be purchased and completely managed by a third-party for a small cut of your profits. Let’s take a look at the most important factors that will help you narrow down the e-commerce solution that best fits your website’s needs:

1. Managed Solution VS. Self-Hosted

The first decision that needs to be made is whether or not you are going to be the person managing the shopping cart, or if you would rather pursue a hosted shopping cart option. Hosted options include such shopping carts as Yahoo Small Business, eCrater, and eBay stores. These sites normally offer hosting and set-up of your site, in addition to payment processing and administrator tools, but normally take a percentage of the profits from your sales. This is the best option for small businesses, people wishing only to offer very few products, or those lacking in technical know-how.

If you plan on hosting the shopping cart site yourself, and managing a merchant account to handle payment processing; you are in need of a self-hosted shopping cart solution. Examples of self-hosted carts that are available on the market include the very popular osCommerce, Zen Cart, and OpenCart. These shopping carts tend to offer much more flexibility with a variety of payment options, customizable plug-ins and modules that will increase your sales conversion rate, however the most important factor to keep in mind is that you will have complete control over the cart and own the site as a whole.

When looking at choosing managed versus self-hosting shopping carts from a business owner’s perspective, it makes much more sense to build your website as a true asset and have complete control over the e-commerce site by going with a self-hosted solution. When looking closer at the managed option the from a search engine marketing perspective, it would make no sense to fuel the rankings of a parent site when you could develop your own online asset on your own domain. A managed solution makes more since for smaller businesses that offer very few products.

2. Search Engine Friendliness (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a huge issue that most shopping carts face because of their dynamic nature. Most of these shopping carts, being based in either ASP or PHP programming languages, assign category and product pages to URLs that are filled with complex query strings, or long lines of a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. This leads to the major search engines indexing these sites under confusing URLS, instead of keyword rich descriptive ones. Getting each and every product page on your site indexed in the major search engines should be the ultimate goal for your shopping cart. Unfortunately, the way most are designed, the product pages are buried so deep within directories that it is very rare that a site’s products get fully indexed.

Unfortunately, many of today’s top selling shopping carts offer no additional SEO plug-ins or options within their cart, or if they do, they do a very poor job at making it easy for the average user to enable search engine friendly principles. Looking for a cart that specifically focuses on search engine friendliness, in other words a search engine optimized cart, is an excellent way to ensure you are getting the most highly qualified traffic to your site through the major search engines. What better sales lead is there than one that is specifically searching for your product or service, and is then directed specifically to the product or service page they are seeking on your website. This is exactly why proper search engine optimization of shopping carts lead to drastic improvements in web traffic conversion rates.

3. Purchased Cart VS. Open Source

Most businesses assume that it will cost their company a pretty penny to buy some of today’s most popular online shopping carts. To their surprise, many of the most used shopping cart solutions on the internet are provided under the creative commons license. These open source shopping carts are available for free and can be completely re-programmed in any way desired and used by anyone for free. They can even be extremely modified and resold. If you have a programmer or developer experienced with dynamic sites, it may be much more worth your time to go with an open source solution such as osCommerce. These carts have a plethora of custom modules that can allow you to do just about anything you can imagine with your shopping cart. These carts, because of the large community of programmers using them, have extensive knowledge databases as well as support forums to help answer even the most difficult questions and concerns with your shopping cart.

If you would prefer to pay for a shopping cart that is already customized or includes certain features you are interested in, I would suggest looking into Volusion or X-Cart. Both of these carts require that you host the shopping cart yourself, but the options that come pre-installed such as QuickBooks are found useful to most businesses. Add-ons such as QuickBook expense exporting come standard in some open source carts such as osCommerce, but may require a little more set-up work than with a paid cart solution. Once again, the cart that you pay for is going to be more ideal for those lacking web masters on staff or technical expertise.

4. Cart Customization

Wouldn’t it be rather monotonous visiting site after site and being offered the exact same layout and features as the previous shopping cart? An important aspect to consider when picking the cart that is right for you is the extent to which you can customize the shopping cart.

You should not only consider how customized you can make the appearance of the shopping cart, but also the layout and additional features that can be installed. Such features as search boxes, recently added products, product reviews, drop shipping modules, and custom payment modules are all excellent features to include on your site to increase user-friendliness and ultimately sales conversions. 

5. Ease of Administrative Control

Every good shopping cart should have some sort of backend, control panel, or administrative log-in through which to manage the products, prices, and order information on the site. This login interface should be easy to use not only by those who are tech savvy, but also be manageable by those with lesser computer knowledge. Having a user friendly admin interface is the best way to ensure you are getting the most out of your shopping cart. It is even more beneficial to be able to have multiple administrative logins, with different levels of access control for each user. That way, a CEO can have full access to managing products and sales reports; where as a marketing director could just have access to the sales reports within the control panel.

Ultimately when choosing which shopping cart to go with, the key principles of internet marketing must be upheld. If your shopping cart is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use, that is wonderful thing, but doesn’t do any good if no one is actually visiting your site. Finding a balance between the factors listed above can be difficult, but always keep in mind the amount of exposure you can receive by closely abiding by search engine standards. Hopefully considering these elements allow you to choose the best shopping cart for your e-commerce needs.