Select An Open Source Shopping Cart - How to create profitable ecommerce store step 3

HOW TO CREATE 

PROFITABLE ONLINE STORE

Step 3: Select An Open Source Shopping Cart 

So you've signed up for your webhost, registered your domain name, and established where you are going to source your goods. It's now time to start working on your online store front.

Most people have the misconception that you have to pay thousands of dollars to hire someone to create a website for you. Thanks to open source, there are many fully featured shopping cart software packages out there that are absolutely free.

What's nice about using an open source shopping cart is that you aren't tied down to a specific company or service provider. You can take your store wherever you go and you pay absolutely nothing.

When my wife and I first started our online store, the available shopping cart choices weren't nearly as mature and feature rich as they are today. Now is the perfect time to start a professional online store at no cost whatsoever.

For this mini course, I went ahead and downloaded, installed and evaluated the latest open source shopping carts to provide you with recommendations. I'll also talk about some of the choices my wife and I made in selecting our shopping cart software and the reasons why we made our selection.

Introduction

First off, there are many free open source shopping carts available to choose from and therein lies the problem.

While everyone will have different criteria for their own shopping cart, I narrowed down my recommendations based on product maturity, features and 3rd party support.

Please note that some of the carts that didn't make my recommended list are absolutely fantastic and have lots of potential but were ultimately lacking a few features that I felt were important. Magento, for example is an amazing and modern shopping cart but it has become extremely buggy ever since they were acquired by Ebay.

In any case, my philosophy is that if you are new to building an online store, you are going to want to err on the more conservative side. You'll want a shopping cart that is stable, fast, does what you want it to do and has a good responsive community. It is based on these criteria that I can wholeheartedly recommend the following carts Prestashop and OpenCart.

OpenCart

OpenCart is an incredibly feature rich shopping cart that is fast, easy to use and has a very modern looking feel to it. While OpenCart doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Prestashop out of the box, it has most of the features that you will need to run a basic store.

In addition, OpenCart is one of the easiest shopping carts to install and get running right away. Why? It's because most if not all webhosts offer a one click installer right from the CPanel interface. You pretty much just have to click on the Simple Scripts installer and voila, you are ready to go.

What I like about OpenCart is the backend administration interface which is simple and intuitive. In addition, there are a ton of companies and independent developers that are very active in developing website templates and themes. And because OpenCart is written very simply, you should be able to make small edits by yourself without always needing a developer.

The downside to OpenCart is that if you require additional functionality that OpenCart doesn't offer, you might need to implement it yourself. But with the vast plugin library that OpenCart offers you'll more than likely be able to find a plugin that does what you need.

Prestashop

Prestashop is another open source shopping cart that I highly recommend. It has more features than OpenCart out of the box and after playing around with it for quite a while, I can say that it is one of the more feature rich open source shopping carts out there right now.

The downside is that Prestashop runs slower than OpenCart and is much more complicated to edit yourself. In addition, plugins for Prestashop cost significantly more than OpenCart as well. But if you are happy with what you get out of the box with Prestashop, then it might be a better choice than OpenCart.

How Easy Is It To Get Up And Running?

Many people are afraid of the technical aspects of getting a website up and running. So to show you how easy it is, I put together a quick video on how to install an open source shopping cart and start your online store in under 5 minutes.

If you can follow the directions in the above video, then you are tech savvy enough to use a free open source shopping cart!

What If I'm Completely Tech Averse?

I generally advocate going with a free open source shopping cart and hosting it yourself as opposed to signing up for an all-in-one hosted ecommerce solution. After all, if you host your shopping cart yourself, you're in charge of your own destiny.

You have full control over the source and no one can suddenly raise prices on you. Plus, there are many cool things that you can do on your own that the big hosted solutions won't allow you to do.

But I've come to realize that using an open source ecommerce solution and self-hosting may not be the right solution for everyone. Some people just don't feel comfortable installing or tweaking their own website let alone modifying an open source shopping cart.

One time, I tried to help a coworker of mine launch her online store using OSCMax. Unfortunately, she didn't possess the basic knowledge to even make simple edits to her store and had to ask for help for every little change. Ultimately, I had her go with a paid solution because of the added support.

What's Out There?

I've spent a lot of time these past few years test driving fully hosted shopping carts and I've found that BigCommerce and Shopify offer the best hosted shopping cart solutions for a low monthly fee.And all 3 of these services have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on what you are looking for.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is also a fully hosted cart that only charges a flat monthly fee with no transaction fees (on their larger plans).But what's awesome is that they also don't impose any bandwidth limits either.This makes BigCommerce the most economical solution in the long run because your fees will not grow linearly with your revenues.

Big Commerce's templates are attractive and they also offer an intuitive drag and drop interface where you can shuffle things around with your store at the click of a button.

The downside of BigCommerce is that they only offer live support Monday-Friday but when they are around, their support is excellent.

Shopify

Shopify is by far the best shopping cart of the bunch in terms of website design and they easily offer the best looking storefronts out of the box. Shopify's main strength is that they have a gigantic library of great looking templates so you can create an awesome looking shop without a designer.

The only downside of Shopify is that it doesn't offer as much functionality out of the box as the other fully hosted carts mentioned above. Certain shopping cart functions are sold a la carte which means you may have to pay for additional features that are included for free with BigCommerce.

However, they do offer a free SSL certificate which includes credit card processing with no monthly fees. As a result, you can launch your store with Shopify almost immediately with no hassles.

Click here to signup for the free Shopify trial

 

Summary Of Fully Hosted Carts

But no matter what you decide, Big Commerce and Shopify will all allow you to launch a fully functional online store within a matter of minutes without knowing a lick of HTML.

I can also attest that the back end features and tracking for these shopping carts are all top notch and there's built in support for popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc... Again if you know the basics of web development, adding these things isn't a big deal but it is convenient.

You Don't Have To Be A Tech Expert To Start

If you have an ounce of tech in you or you are eager to learn about the web, then I still recommend hosting your own cart. Who knows? BigCommerce and Shopify could go out of business someday and take your store down with it. They could also increase their fees once you are dependent on their services.

But for now, Big Commerce and Shopify are offering a heck of a deal to start a fully featured online store with no hassles. If you want to avoid the technical aspects altogether and focus on selling, then going with either of these services is a good choice.

What If I Want To Use Wordpress?

I get a lot of questions from readers who want to run their online stores on Wordpress in conjunction with an ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce and here's my take.

Wordpress was not designed for ecommerce. As a result, it will not scale well as you add more products and attract more customers.

In other words as your store grows, your website will slow to a crawl much sooner than the open source counterparts I mentioned earlier and you will need more powerful servers to run your shop.

In addition, Wordpress is constantly updated and most likely you will be using a bunch of plugins with your site. Keeping all of the plugins up to date with Wordpress is a major chore. Even today, I often hesitate to click the upgrade button on my own blog because I'm afraid a plugin is going to break.

If you insist on running your store on Wordpress, then there's only 1 plugin I recommend and it is called Ecwid. Ecwid stands for "Ecommerce widget" and offers a hybrid solution of open source and fully hosted.

Here's how it works...

While you will still run your Wordpress blog on your own webhost, the shopping cart portion of your website will be run off of Ecwid's servers.

As a result, your Wordpress blog will not slow down because of your online store and vice versa. Because Ecwid handles the entire shopping cart portion of your site, you have the best of both worlds.

You can run your blog on Wordpress and have an online store that is seamlessly integrated together on your website.

You've Given Me Too Many Choices. What Should I Choose?

Unfortunately, only you can answer that question. I've already narrowed down the field from hundreds to just a handful of shopping carts for you. Most if not all of these shopping carts can provide you with a test drive of the front and back end of the storefront as well. Do your own due diligence and run through the features of each cart to determine what you need.

I would naturally start with one of the 3 open source shopping cart options that I've recommended because they are free. In addition, you have full control over the source code of your shopping cart and can add new features at any time. All of the open source shopping carts I mentioned above have a strong developer community that is constantly adding new plugins and additional functionality for free.

If coding or installation is way over your head, then I would then look at some of the paid options that I mentioned above like BigCommerce or Shopify. Again, keep in mind that once you choose a shopping cart, it is extremely hard to migrate to another platform. Plus, the fees with respect to fully hosted solutions may seem small at first but substantially increase once your store kicks into high gear.

If you already have a Wordpress blog, then I would give the Ecwid plugin a try.

What Do I Use?

I selected the base OSCommerce install to run our online wedding linens store. Looking back, this was probably not the best decision but I went with OSCommerce because I was paranoid about server speed. Things can be quite unpredictable when you use a shared hosting environment. I knew that I wanted my store to run as fast as possible, so I chose a very basic store and only added the functionality that I absolutely needed.

The following are must have features in a shopping cart

• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• Availability of 3rd party templates and themes
• Fast product upload from a spreadsheet
• Coupons/Gift vouchers
• Wide array of payment processors
• Cross selling
• Dynamic photo resizer
• Integration with real time shipping services
• Single page checkout

Today, my store is so heavily customized that it is difficult to add any new features. Eventually, I will migrate our cart to something more powerful but it will be an extremely painful move. If I were to do it all over again, I would have used Prestashop or OpenCart. Both Prestashop and OpenCart run fairly well on a shared hosting environment so you have nothing to worry about.

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