Which shopping cart software do you use to manage ecommerce on your site? And, why exactly did you choose it over other alternatives that you had?

I'd be interested in hearing the responses.... specially on shopping carts that intergrate with good drop shippers.

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Final Fantasy

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PayPal - ease of use and ever expanding user base.

I don't have a shopping cart on my site per se - I just make a custom page up when a client elects to pay by credit/debit card.

'WorldPay' are extortionists.

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Logo Design • Vector Conversion • Print
www.eagleimagery.co.uk

Just curious, what makes you think so?

Annual fees are acceptable (just) but the set-up fee is just insane (do they not want people's business?)...

The worst thing though is the fact that you can't get hold of your hard-earned money for weeks and weeks on end.

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Logo Design • Vector Conversion • Print
www.eagleimagery.co.uk

I use Zen-Cart, but as far as integration with drop shippers, I have no idea. I doubt any of mine even have it in a database format anything could read.

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Paintball Forums
Affordable Web Design
Hattiesburg Forums

I use Ecommercetemplates.com, at around $120.00 each, you get a complete shopping cart that you can setup either in unix or windows host, then you can choose your payment provider to be paypal, 2checkout, worldpay, etc.

romino

Setup fees of $450.00 and higher, highest fees of any third party processor out there. You can get a merchant account for much cheaper and with less fees. However they are practically the only company that allows you to take money from some obscure countries where eCommerce is an unknown factor.

Compare them to echoinc.com and you can see the difference.

Any dropshipper worth your business should be able to provide a list of their products, descriptions, pricing and skus (at the minimum) in a standard spreadsheet or csv format. This can be used to handle import into a system like Zen-Cart with some modification of the Easy Populate Add-on.

If you do not have a spreadsheet program then I recommend getting one. The best is Microsoft Excel. OpenOffice provides a distant runner up but for me fails in the useability category. Every product that I sell is in an Excel Spreadsheet with macros that allow me to print pricelists for every category or single categories. Each category is in its own worksheet within the spreadsheet itself. I can easily update my prices across a category if need be (as in a recent 10% increase of prices across the board). I currently carry over 1,000 products in 10 categories.

I am currently using Zen-Cart as well but will probably migrate back to OSCommerce after the release of Milestone 3. The coding is just better in that new version. The coding and optimization in Zen-Cart is pretty atrocious so I wouldn't recommend it for a large scale retail site. The developer's don't know anything about optimizing a MySQL query and have queries within loops making it very resource heavy. Unfortunately, it has some features not available in OSCommerce. Zen-Cart is actually based on OSC though, the developers simply changed the names of the functions, added some features and released it as their own project. The name changing breaks backwards compatibility with OSC which is a shame because there are hundreds of modules and contributions they could have used otherwise.

Never really evaluated any of the paid solutions. When I started, they were too expensive and way out of the budget. My online store (which is a mess marketing wise currently) started as a favor to a friend who owned a local retail business. Over time, she made me a partner in the business because she didn't have the time to devote to it due to family and health issues. Back in 2003, the retail store closed and I bought the remaining inventory.

I was wondering how your store was doing Wayne and if you kicked it into high gear yet.

Are you uploading the csv file onto the server and are the prices being read off of that or are you importing the csv into a database?

I have excel and I gotta agree that its probably a lot more flexible when you need to do some quick data manipulation.

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Final Fantasy