Shopping Carts for Small Sites
Web Commerce Today, Issue 6, January 15, 1998
Small stores often can't afford all the bells and whistles of a full-blown store-building program. Here are some low-cost alternatives that will help you with shopping cart features that your customers will appreciate.
Store-Building Software
The market is now being flooded with some very good store-building software for low prices. A couple of the best have been around long enough to mature:
- ShopSite Manager 3.2 is $495 plus hosting for the first year is under $1,000, that is, if you set it up yourself. ShopSite offers a great deal of flexibility for different kinds of stores. While you can conceivably set up any number of products, we feel that at 200 the merchant's set-up screens are getting pretty cluttered, though from the customer's view there is no problem. Read our review.
- Viaweb 4.0 is $100 per month for up to 50 products, including hosting. It requires no installation, since Viaweb hosts the sites, and a person with basic skills can prepare it to sell products using only a Web browser. Viaweb provides excellent software support for a first class store and has received top reviews, including PC Magazine's Editor's Choice. Viaweb also offers the ability to do real-time credit card processing for an extra charge.
Cartservers
But if your projected sales are pretty low or you just have a few products, you have another option: cartserver systems which host the shopping cart and e-mail you the orders.- Americart Shopping Cart Service provides a shopping cart, secure server, and digital certificate for only $249 per year. You may try it for up to 60 days for no charge, if you like. The system offers a sophisticated set-up screen for the cart including ways to customize the screen with your logo, calculate tax, calculate shipping, and check for an order under the minimum you set. While it does not do real-time credit card authorization, it does check the numbers of the credit card to make sure it conforms to a valid credit card number algorithm. You are e-mailed the order except for the last 6 digits of the credit card number. The final digits of the card number can be picked up from a password protected area. Another option is to have orders faxed to you, requiring an account with another company for 15 cents per page.
- The Internet Shopping Cart Server is apparently the pioneer service of this type, developed by James Cloud. They charge $120 for six months, though it doesn't seem quite as advanced as the Americart system and doesn't offer secure order retrieval.
Two Web stores we talked to who are using this type of product seemed to like it. David Sabot of Dave's Humidors has used Americart for a couple of months and has run 200 orders through it without any problems. Karl Dahlin and Phil Nebe of HLC of Virginia set up Americart about seven months ago on their client's site, Teach N Things Online, and have found it works well. Americart automatically sends an e-mail to a fax service, which faxes (for about 15 cents and order plus long distance charges, if any) the order to the storeowner. The storeowner then logs on with a username and password to get the last six digits of the credit card number so no security is compromised.
The disadvantage of this solution is that it requires HTML skill to make changes and updates. There is no Web browser-administered back office like ShopSite Manager or Viaweb have. But the price is excellent for those who have HTML skills to maintain it, or have their developers who can make needed changes.
A variation on this is Anacom Merchant Services' WebCart, which adds the ability to do real-time credit card processing as part of the service (Anacom's core business) for $79.95 per month. Their WebCart without real-time processing is $69.95 per month and includes a product search feature. Each option requires a set-up charge.
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