Shopping Carts For The Faint Of Heart

The chief criteria for judging an ecommerce shopping cart are the number of credit card processors and shipping services it supports, and the number of people that support it. Why? Because credit card processors and shipping services mutate all the time. Your cart will require updating. Which service works today may go out of business tomorrow, and leave you with the orders piling up. Other important criteria are how easy it is to set up, and add products, and how easy it is for the customer to use. When you set up your shop test it using a wide variety of the oldest and buggiest browsers you can find. If your web store works under them you're home and dry. Here are the cheapest, simplest, and most effective carts I've found: Oscommerce (free) - http://www.x-cart.com Similar to Oscommerce. Requires a customer to register before they can make a purchase. Lots of features and add-ons. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services. Has an affiliate program add-on, and lets others sell products though your cart. Dansie Cart (commercial) - http://www.icdevgroup.org A version of the old Akopia / Minivend carts. Complex product with lots of files and a lot of setting up to do. A complete solution, and includes the option of third party credit-card real-time order processing. Encrypts orders. Agora (free) - http://www.siteinteractive.com A CGI-based shopping cart which also functions as an affiliate program. Other webmasters earn commissions by signing up and linking to your site. ShopFactory (commercial) - http://www.webgenie.com A simple, wizard-based option. Uses Javascript a bit, but the main work is done by CGI scripts. It saves the credit card information on your server. It's for someone who hasn't set up a CGI script before. Expensive for what you get, but it works. Option to buy it on hire-purchase. Actinic Catalog (commercial) - http://www.briggsoft.com A clever little program. It's a standalone Windows executable, which the customer downloads. The customer starts it up, chooses the product, enters their details, and sends off their order like an email, with the credit card details encrypted. It costs $29.00 at the time of writing. No secure server or order page needed; it's all done on the customer's PC at their leisure. You need to customise it. Make sure you write your mail server URL into the code. For the customer, the order module is a 160kb download. NOTE: Try to avoid carts that use cookies and javascript only, or that tie you into only one secure server and credit-card processor. Also avoid web-based services that you lease only. They can go out of business, leaving you flat. Having read the above you should have eliminated quite a few programs from your shopping list. They either won't work properly with all browsers, or they won't encrypt your order, or they want to tie you into their manufacturers' secure order system at $40+ per month. Another option is to get a bespoke system set up for you by a specialist company. These cost thousands of dollars. Aren't you glad you read this far? T. O' Donnell (