by Jacky Red

Relax while your shopping cart does the work

If you want to find the right Ecommerce shopping cart for your business, then you need to know more about the companies that are servicing the market today. In the following guide, three different shopping carts will be discussed, Volusion ecommerce carts, 1ShoppingCart, and MonsterCommerce.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

When you have a customized shopping cart system, there may be complexities and difficulties in establishing your cart, but these setups often support the versatility that most business owners require. With a customizable system, you can decide how your shopping cart will be presented to all of your customers. Some of the websites will allow you to build your site from scratch, or you can adjust an existing template to fit the look and feel you desire for your website.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Support

Due to the complexities of some shopping cart setups, you are likely going to require customer support at some point. All of the companies supply excellent customer service to help you through the establishment of your cart. If you choose 1ShoppingCart though, you may find the free telephone support to be insufficient for large demanding websites. In truth, there is no free telephone support. It is all by email and answered rather rapidly.
There is a telephone support for corporate but after the first period its on a billing basis.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software Companies

Volusion

For this reason, you may want to look into Volusion shopping carts. This website can fit all of your needs, from the time you first go to their website, to the moment your shopping cart is complete. When you have good customer service throughout your shopping cart experience, you can be assured that you will have all of the necessary tools necessary for creating a professional website shopping cart.

MonsterCommerce

If you join MonsterCommerce, you will likely find the support available to you very satisfying. This company prides themselves on their customer support, and they are there for you throughout the establishment of your cart. If you choose Volusion, it is likely that you will also be satisfied with the customer support provided. This company gives live customer service from the first moment you become interested in their company. For this reason, you can be assured that if you ever have a question you are unable to answer, someone will always be available to assist you when the time comes.

Free Trials

One of the easiest ways to find the right company for your business is by testing out each company in live trials. When you can test out each company, you can assess the precise details of Ecommerce shopping carts that are important to your business. When you can actually put the system into action, you can ascertain which shopping cart best fits your needs. Volusion provides a free 14 day no obligations free trial to their customers. This can be very valuable for anyone who is skeptical about the reliability of the service offered by these companies.

1ShoppingCart Trial

1ShoppingCart also provides a trial, for a mere 3.95. That is a very small price to pay to find out if their offerings are capable of handling the demands of your business. MonsterCommerce does not supply a free trial, but if you want to find out what their services are like, you can always get their cheapest package for a month. When you purchase this package, you will get to see what their entire experience is like in order to compare it to the others.

PCI Hosting - Ecommerce Software

A trial offer is a great way to find out more about Ecommerce shoppingcarts services. The best way to discover which shopping cart can best suit your business is by giving them a test run. Once you have seen the performance, customization options, and customer service each company provides, you will know which cart is the right one for you.

Would you like to add a shopping cart to your domain? The ecommerce shopping cart is definitely the route to take. While you are shopping around, in addition, you should look into ecommerce merchant accounts.

P.S.

MonsterCommerce is no longer called this name. It has been rolled into Network Solutions and is basically a hidden product but under the Network Solutions name. We say, its Hidden because it used to be one of the largest, fastest growing online shoppingcarts. Unfortunately, one now has to try real hard to even find the cart within the Network Solutions menu system.

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Relax at a Resort while your shoppingcart and autoresponders do the work

Letting Your Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software Do the Work !

Setting up an ecommerce shopping cart can be a daunting task, especially for someone who is not the most computer savvy person. Online business is great and can be manageable for most. It’s not as easy as some people make it out to be, but then

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

with the help of the right ecommerce shoppingcart software you would be surprised at how much the task can be eased. In order to make this an easier process for you, there are 7 things you should know before choosing an online shopping cart for your website.

The first thing that you should recognize is that no two internet shopping carts are created exactly alike. These are meant to be customized for the site that they are going to be used on. The providers for these can offer lots of bells and whistles to make them more appealing, or they go to offering the bare minimum to decrease the cost. It all depends on the software and provider that you end up going with. Needless to say you will need to do some careful homework.

Need for Ecommerce Software Hosting

Hosting for PCI Compliant Shopping Cart

Secondly, you need to realize that many of ecommerce shopping cart sites now require a PCI Compliant server for hosting, Many of the providers that you come across will offer this as part of the package, however, not all of them will. Be sure to ask before you settle on something. In the end the more questions that you ask upfront will save you lots of headaches. And the kicker, PCI compliance has just gotten tigher so many prior hosting companies will be unable to comply with the list of new changes for better user security in ecommerce shopping cart packages.

Third, you should examine the level of personalization available to you. While on the surface you would think that the more customized it is, the better it will be for your business. You might even have something very nice already worked out in your mind, however, there is a downside to this. The more customization available also means the more skilled you need to be with the computer. This is definitely an item that you want to be simple to start with. As you build your own skills, you can always upgrade or revamp it later on.

Fourth is inventory tracking. You should not have to watch your website constantly or update it continually to keep up with the inventory. As you site gains more business this could really get dicey. You would never be able to sleep!

If you are selling shippable items ( not digital ) there should be a record keeping component to it that is related to inventory. It needs to know to list something as out of stock for you when someone orders the last of something. It should also be able to keep track of your sales for you. This should help you get to a point where your records almost take care of themselves. You can do without this to start but I know one very large, very dumb UK jewellery retailer whose website never reflected what was truly available in his stock. Many, many of you in the UK would order from his web page then get a phone call later saying the item ordered wasn’t available.

Online Shopping Cart Hosting

Because this jewellery dealer was so very extraordinarily successful at selling wholesale to the big name brands, he was not nearly interested enough in the online retailing to even begin discussing the problem even when consultants gave him suggestions and possible fixes.

Last but not least is PCI compliance with VISA and MasterCard. The rules on this tighten again mid 2010. You can not put a form on your hosted shoppingcart that asks for the users visa/mastercard information.

No, you can’t even do this anymore using SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer ) or HTTPS. If your merchant bank catches you doing this, according to Visa rules they can at their discretion revoke your merchant account. With no merchant account you would have no way to get money online except through paypal which while a growing alternative is not yet widely accepted enough for non digital business transactions.

Finally, if you find yourself wondering what one of them looks like in action, you can always check them out on other people’s websites. This is by far the best way to judge how user friendly they are, and how they look to the customer. You could visit some of your favorite sites, then contact the person or company that runs it and ask them what they use.

PCI Hosting - Ecommerce Software

Setting up your own ecommerce website is not an overnight thing, despite what some people may have you believe. To really make it work you need to do some research and homework beforehand. The more time and effort you put into it the better it will work out in the end.

And the 7th and what we think is the most important thing to know relates again to PCI Compliance. Don’t try to get PCI Compliance on your own. I have been there and done that with a fairly large company. It took 6 weeks of audits in which they shut down all wireless communication in the office, had us move all servers to a secure location in New York, stopped us from using dozens of so called insecure 3rd party programs in our office and the list goes on. And guess what, every year, Visa inspectors came back and audited yet again.

So be prepared to use a hosted shoppingcart solution that involves getting around the very pesty PCI Compliance requirements from Visa. Some major well known retailers are going to lose their PCI Compliance with Visa this year as the cost of this is going to skyrocket to over 400,000 USD annually for many retailers. So using a hosted Ecommerce shopping cart sofware solution gets you right around this very sticky problem.