CUSTOMIZING YOUR SHOPPING CART
- We've never seen a shopping cart that is just what its owner wants right out of the box. And we've seen a lot of shopping carts. We've customized a lot of shopping carts too. Some no longer look like shopping carts.
- We are database experts, graphics wizards and we work with php and javascript. If you know shopping carts you know what that means. We'll take your shopping cart and make it truly YOURS. We can add or change functionality. We can adapt your cart to a skin for a cart that isn't yours (an OSCommerce skin on X-Cart, for example).
- We work for reasonable rates, do our work in-house, and invoice upon completion. Give us a call. We'll walk you through some carts we have customized, discuss what you want, and give you a solid estimate of time and cost. If you decide to go ahead, we'll do the work as promised, and finish it when it was promised.
- We Know eCommerce. You will not be disappointed. To paraphrase the guy with the beard: We guarantee it.
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SHOPPING CART SELECTION - WHETHER UPGRADING OR NEW
- There's a lot of bad info on the Internet about Shopping Carts. Most is self-serving and the worst of it are outright lies. There are the comparisons showing distorted and incomplete feature lists. Then there are scare tactics about some cart being only for "newbies", another cart sure to frustrate, or one you'll outgrow before it's installed.
- Underperforming Internet shopping sites are too numerous to count. The number of sites that utterly fail as online businesses due to a marginal or malfunctioning shopping cart is very large. Some of the worst carts are anything but inexpensive. Once invested in one of these marvels, the grief it will cause to change carts can be large too.
- We sell and support X-Cart, but it's not the only good one out there. We picked X-Cart for eCommerce sites we own. As a result we support X-Cart, but we support many others as well. Shopping carts are a lot like automobiles in that the basics tend to be alike. The differences are mostly in the power, and the whistles and bells.
- If you are in the market for a shopping cart and are uncertain about which to choose, give us a call. We'll share our experiences as online retailers and as consultants to numerous online merchants. Whether we can or do decide to work together, you'll end up better informed. A first call costs nothing and there is no obligation or pressure.
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CHANGING A SHOPPING CART - SOMETHING TO DO AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE
- If you have to change your shopping cart for whatever reason, now is the time to get it right. If it's just a version change (update) or a tricky or difficult patch to a cart that is otherwise satisfactory, we can probably do that for you. If it's an X-Cart we can do it for sure.
- If you are moving to a new shopping cart because you must, especially if your site is down until you do, give us a call. We've handled many such problems. Nobody likes working under pressue when an online store has tanked, except maybe us. We'll check it out fast, give you our opinion, and if you give us a green light we'll jump on it right away. Everybody understands that if a site goes down, THAT is priority #1.
- If you have to change your shopping cart, but you have a little time before you do, now is the time to get that right too. Call us. We'll give you straight answers and an insider experience. You might not decide upon one of our carts (and we might recommend that you don't), but if you do we'll guarantee the work. With us, no high pressure to buy, ever.
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TOP 5 REQUIREMENTS
DON'T COMMIT TO A SHOPPING CART WITHOUT THESE
- 1: Get the Source Code and the License. A proprietary shopping cart means that your shopping cart vendor owns the code and may choose to provide it only on their server. That means the vendor is your host now and forever, and the features it's capable of handling are the features you get. Now, there are some great proprietary carts out there available only from the vendor. The Yahoo Shopping Cart is a great example. This is, however, like a marriage. Some are made in heaven, and some are not. Shopping Cart Divorce is hell.
- 2: Plan for Growth. How many products do you have and how many WILL you have? Changing a shopping cart is a major deal (see above). Make certain the cart you pick can handle at least five years of planned growth. Even that may be insufficient. If you're growing fast, super-busy, and your cart gets overwhelmed, it'll be the very worst time to go through a shopping cart upgrade.
- 3: Know your hosting provider and your server capacity. This is especially true if you select a proprietary cart limited to the cart vendor's servers. Low volume, low bandwidth servers are fine to begin with, but they won't grow with you. Be sure you understand the limits of your server and your options if you exceed them.
- 4: Know who can and will support your cart. Open source shopping carts can be a fine option, BUT adding a bunch of third-party modules from different developers can result in an overall installation that no single vendor can support. That's bad, and it can get very bad.
- 5: Get References and actually talk to a few people using the cart you plan to select. It's hard to over-emphasize this. If you talk only to cart vendors and the consultants that support them you may get opinions that will differ from those merchants actually dealing with the cart under real conditons. Enough said...
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