Is the best shopping cart always the most popular shopping cart?

When you look at starting a website or ecommerce store you look online for what most people are using. The most popular programs are typically the best, or are they?

What people don't realize is that in fact the most popular programs are often the worst programs to use.

even though the vast majority of people might use them, it is often for the wrong reasons. Not to mention, that the vast majority of people running businesses are not even successful. So basing what you choose on thousands of other peoples actions that don't make any money is a big mistake.

Lets take for example the whole wordpress craze from some years back.

What drove that? A bunch of teen age bloggers that eventually moved to facebook to get dates and then grew up and moved on. But tens of thousands of businesses took their websites to wordpress because that was the most popular, the most visible and the most used.

Now, that is poor logic since it was never intended to be used for any type of ecommerce application, or any business application. But when millions start using it, there is a market, people create plug ins and it has the appearance of being something very useful.

Hosting companies package it in cheap hosting plans because it is FREE to them and the legend grows. Everyone believes that if you need a website, you need wordpress.

But in fact, it is, it falls short and the real reason for its popularity was how simple and easy it was to use and that it was FREE. So teenagers with no budget, loved the simplicity and the fact that there was no cost.

On the other hand, businesses needed plug ins, paid thousands of dollars to have sites built and found out the hard way that it was not what they needed.

Think about this:

If the new craze is SKATEBOARDS, do you go out and buy 10 of them as delivery vehicles for your business?

Hopefully not. I hope you realize, just because a bunch of teens drive the market it does not mean that skateboards are the answer to all of your transportation needs.

That may sound crazy, but that is exxactly what happens with popular hosting systems and popular shopping carts.

The more comprehensive ecommerce systems like pageBuzz.com will not get all the buzz, because it takes more effort to run them, has extensive shipping and sale options and requires more time and effort to set up.

Other simple carts like Presta Shop, Magento and OS commerce take they stage because, they are FREE. And because they are FREE, webmasters and website hosts push customers to them to save money and make bigger profits.

And with 95% of the new businesses failing in the first year, so what if it can't do what they need? It saves them money and they are going to give up soon anyway.

But lets say you don't want to fail? You really want to make a business, what do you need?

Just like any other business, shopping carts and a tool and the wrong tools can kill a business and the right tools can make you a millionaire.

Having a better infrastructure can be the difference between failure and success. Having the right team, the right tools, the right plan.

What will surely lead to failure is taking an of the shelf plan like wordpress and trying to compete with businesses that have more comprehensive platforms, better networks and more technology.

It is the businesses that take the path that is unique and different that usually succeed. Because they have something different than the other 95% of the businesses.

How did Domino's pizza become so big and smash all the local pizza shops across the country?

They delivered.

What a novel concept, order a pizza and have it delivered to your home in 30 minutes. Now every pizza shop has to offer the same service to compete, but Dominos cleaned up and grew into a huge empire while smaller shops stayed with their same simple business plan that 95% of the other pizza shops used and a huge percentage of them closed because of the competition.

The simple facts are that if you try something different you stand above the rest, while if you do what they are doing, you have nothing to offer.

Shopping carts like pageBuzz.com have more to offer merchants, but it is not as popular as the free more simplified carts that are being raved about in the forums and blogs by businesses that have more time to rave about what they are doing than actually doing it.

If you look at the numbers and realize that 95% of the people that recommended for others to use wordpress are now out of business, that should tell you something.

Hey look, I am using Zen Cart, you should use it for your business. Now you see me, now you don't, I am OUT OF BUSINESS! That was fun.

You just cannot assume that because something is popular that it is the right platform for your business. It is actually the very opposite. If something is popular, it is probably not the right fit for your business.

If bicycles are more popular than cars, do you trade your car in for a bicycle?

Of course not, because they are very different tools and offer very different results.

When you look online for a shopping cart or a website host, you have to consider what that provides. More than just cost, will it give you what you need to run your business? Will it be usable? Will it allow you to grow?

Taking the fastest, easiest and cheapest option is like buying a bicycle instead of a car. You saves a shit load of money, don't have to worry about gas, insurance or even having a drivers license. But can it do what you need?

So stop looking for what is popular and start looking for something that fits your business.

At pageBuzz we offer 7 day support, on site programming updates and continued software development. While many of those popular options offer no support, they are not developed and if something goes wrong, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix.

Those are the issues that case catastrophic business failures and put so many small businesses out of business.

So rather than being a statistic, one of the 95%, stop looking at what the 95% are using and find something that the other 5% of successful business are using.

When you have better processes, better ideas and better tools it make success that much easier.

So rather than asking which shopping cart online is the most used, ask yourself which shopping carts have the highest success rates for the business using them. And which shopping cart has the right tools for your business.