How to Find the BEST Shopping Cart to use Online

If you are looking for a shopping cart to use for your online business we certainly hope you will consider the pageBuzz.com system, but is that the best choice for you?

If you don't know much about the Internet understand, you need software to run your online store.

You can buy a software program for between $100.00 and $100,000.00 depending on what you need or even download one free. Opensouce solution like OS Commerce or Zen Cart are very popular because they are in fact free. But they also lack any support, as you always get what you pay for.

But there is another solution and pageBuzz falls in that model of "Hosted Solutions", complete systems that are hosted as part of the license. So you get all the interfaces, tools and support you need as part of the monthly fee.

Unfortunately for us, we are not the only company doing it. Companies like Godaddy, Web.com and others all offer hosted solutions as part of the online site builders, so which is the best for you?

Lets not get into this cart is better than that one or bicker about which operating systems is better to use. Because all of these carts have their strengths and weaknesses.

What you need to look at is what the cart offers and if it is right for your business?

I don't care if you buy a $1000.00 a month cart from Yahoo Small Business Solutions, if you need a cart that lets you charge return shipping for rental items and theirs does not, then the cart is not worth anything to you.

So rather than searching for the best cart to use, you should be looking for a cart that does all the things you want.

We can talk about some of the differences but ultimately you should make a call and speak to each company and make sure their cart has all the features you need before you sign up or buy a product.

On example I remember is when I opened our cart originally as BumblebeeWorks.com and a customer called me up and said, "I just spent $10,000 on ads and I am having a sale this weekend, Buy one Get one Free. How do I set that up in the cart?".

As my head spun wondering why anyone would spend all that money before asking if the cart supported hat type of sales method, I had to tell the customer it can't do that. Now, I could add that functionality but not before your sale starts tomorrow.

Of course we added things like that since and much more, but the point is, you can't just assume that because you have an idea that the cart will support it.

In order for a cart to support something, a programmer needed to write it and most programmers don't come up with their own ideas, they add when asked by customers.

Eve the best programmers have no clue what you might need in a cart so over time, carts get better and better and some have some features ad some don't.

One thing we don;t have that the Godaddy system does support is digital download, selling ebooks or digital files that can be instantly downloaded on payment. For us, it was never a good business model, so when people sign up with out asking, they are upset that the can't run the business they wanted to.

We are sad, because we end up refunding the sale and lose a customer, but we also never advertised that anyone could offer digital delivery using our cart and never imply that that type of business is possible with our cart.

So in the thousands of pages of information we have, none of them say that.

It is the customer that makes the assumption that a shopping cart is a shopping cart and with ours being so affordable, they sign up without calling, asking questions or comparing our cart with others.

Needless to say, those types of business people wont last long in business when they don't take the time to do the most basic research.

You also have to consider size, our cart is limited to 2500 items, more than enough for most small businesses. But Yahoo offers a store at 50,000 products which is an entirely different animal.

People will sign up, get to 2500 items and call us asking us to allow them more, but we just can't, our cart won't support it so all the work they did was wasted.

And on the flip side, people with just a few items sign up at Yahoo and later realize that Yahoo wants 1.5% of their sales. So if they sell $10,000.00 in one month, that $10 shopping cart now costs $160.00.

Some companies charge for traffic volumes, so having a lot of window shoppers could end up costing you more money or resulting in your website being taken offline for using too many resources.

All of these issues are little know or expected when people sign up for websites with shopping carts.

We have a strict policy, of no extra fees, $20 covers everything we offer so you always have the same monthly cost. We manage resources so you never have a website offline because you had too many visitors.

Why is that important?

Lets look at the store that sells Christmas decorations. They spend a year building and advertising their website, never have an issue and then the traffic starts when the holiday hits. The site is closed because it is using too much CPU time on the server. Well of course it is, because they do all of their sales in 2 months of the year.

So the system administrators assumed they would only use a small volume and loaded the server with a balanced load. But when they store starts selling at high volume, it caused other sites on the server to slow down and was cosed automatically by software monitoring CPU usage of each website.

Needless to say it is a bust for the business owner and a big mistake for the owner not to speak with the website provider to make sure those resources would be available when they needed it.

Opensource carts like OS Commerce are free, but they are also not efficient and use SQL databases which can easily crash servers under high loads.

Using hosted solutions like pageBuzz insure that that is not going to be a problem.

So as you can see, each cart has it's own features, its own strengths and its own way of operating. The all run on different servers, different operating systems and all are tunned to work best for what they do support.

It really is not a question of finding the best online ecommerce solution, because they are all good, but finding the one that has the right tools, support and resources for your business.

You would not go out and but a Ford Festiva to deliver firewood each day. Or buy an ax to cut down 500 trees. You need the right tool for the job and each cart does some job very well. Just find the cart that does the job you need it to do very well.