Ecommerce Shopping Carts - Hosted Shopping Cart Solutions Versus Off-the-Shelf Software

If you're planning to start an e-commerce website selling products online, one of the key decisions you'll have to make is about the shopping cart that you plan to deploy on your website. There are three ways to approach this. You can buy off-the-shelf shopping cart software or download an open source shopping cart software offered by some software developer who decides to make it available under the GNU license. Alternatively if your requirements are very specific you can hire a developer to code a shopping card solution for you from scratch. The third option is to sign up with a company like Yahoo that offers a hosted shopping cart solution. Let's examine the implications of each of these options.

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Off-the-Shelf Shopping Cart Software

If you buy an off-the-shelf shopping cart solution, you have to ensure that it meets your requirements perfectly. It has to be compatible with the platform you're working on. You have to consider the degree of customization that is possible with such a solution. The licensing model also needs to be looked at carefully. Typically such a solution is usually expensive. Companies that sell shopping cart software also try to milk their customers for technical support and try to sell them upgrades from time to time. If they make the source code available, you may be able to hire a freelancer to make changes to the solution if required. Most companies that sell commercial shopping cart software will not make the source code available and you will have to depend on them for customization and maintenance. This will drive up your costs in the long run.

Open-source Shopping Cart Software

There is a lot of free shopping cart software available on the Internet. It cost nothing to download the software and use it on your website. Many of these solutions have an entire community dedicated to contributing patches and fixing bugs related to the software. Open-source software may not always be reliable and stable. The best part about open source is that there is usually no license fee. Some developers do insist on a fee when you're using their software for commercial websites. There is a great deal of customization possible with open source software but you have to be on your toes all the time to ensure that all the security patches that they release are applied from time to time. You will also be to periodically update the software as new versions are released. You also need to consider whether the software will work on the platform you are using and whether it will seamlessly integrate with your website. Other aspects that need to be considered include the reliability of the software, the ability to scale up and handle tens of thousands of products. For technical support you usually need to depend on the community and join the forum that they are all a part of. You can usually find some freelancers offering paid support for such software but you will almost certainly have to give more time managing an open source solution than you would otherwise. Besides, the software needs to function smoothly even when you have a huge number of users. If it doesn't deliver on all these counts, despite being free open source software may end up costing you money in terms of lost sales and revenue opportunities.

Hosted Shopping Cart Solutions

With hosted shopping cart solutions, the software lives on the server of the shopping cart solution provider. All the technical aspects of creating, updating, managing and upgrading the shopping cart are handled by the solution provider. You don't have to worry about applying security patches on the software or upgrading it to a newer version. All of this is taken care of by the shopping cart solution provider. In most cases your website is also hosted by the solution provider. So platform compatibility is not an issue. If you opt for a reputed company such as Yahoo, you can be sure that the shopping cart solution offered is robust, reliable and scalable. Shopping cart solution providers monitor their solutions 24-7 and you don't have to lose sleep wondering if everything is fine. You don't need to own the infrastructure or license expensive software. For a single flat fee everything is taken care of. Companies which are the backbone for hundreds of thousands of websites providing shopping cart solutions and hosting solutions to them have all the resources in terms of infrastructure and technical support personnel to handle any emergency that comes your way. They're in a far better and stronger position than a single merchant managing an e-commerce website. You don't need to hire IT professionals or software engineers to manage a website if you're for a hosted shopping cart solution. With the shopping cart solutions offered by Yahoo, you can also use any of the hundreds of web design templates that they offer. This helps to make your website very impressive and ensures seamless integration of the hosted shopping cart solution with the rest of your website. This is more than you can say for several other shopping cart solution providers as well as off-the-shelf shopping cart software. The best of companies with brilliant programmers often come up with poor interfaces for their shopping carts. This results in poorly designed websites that turn off the visitor. With Yahoo and the large number of web design templates they offer you can ensure that your visitors can't tell where the web design ends and the shopping cart begins. All of this comes together to create a powerful impact and inspire confidence in your brand. Despite being a hosted shopping cart solution everything is closely integrated with your website. Another advantage of having an e-commerce store at Yahoo is that the confidence in the Yahoo brand rubs off on your e-commerce store. People know that when they are shopping at your store, Yahoo is the payment processor and the shopping cart solution provider. This also plays a role in convincing them to bring out their credit cards and shop at your website. Yahoo offers 24-7 technical support by e-mail and toll-free phone. You can add up to 50,000 products to your website by just importing them from an Excel spreadsheet. They also give you a free domain name and advertising vouchers worth $150 that you can use to buy advertising on Yahoo search marketing and Google AdWords. There are many other advantages to with Yahoo in their shopping cart solutions. Read our complete review of Yahoo Merchant Solutions or visit the Yahoo Merchant Solutions website to know more. Having a strong and stable technology partner like Yahoo for just $39 95 a month is very worthwhile. It frees you of the responsibility of managing the technical aspects of your e-commerce website and allows you to focus on selling your products and generating revenue. By devoting your time to these important activities you will recover many times the investment in the shopping cart solution.