The Shopping Cart Junkie

If you are considering opening an online store, you will, eventually, need to decide whether to use an installable shopping cart script, a hosted web store, or a custom e commerce solution.

Your decision will depend, largely, upon where you are in the development of your online business, whether or not you have an existing brick and mortar business, what resources are available to you, and just how much technical expertise you have.

Let’s take a look at all three options:

The customized ecommerce solution probably makes the most sense for a company which already has an existing offline business. In such cases, the company already has a marketing program, order fulfillment structure, and a fairly set in stone way of doing things. It would be incredibly difficult to try to make an off the shelf piece of software fit your existing model. The more complex your business, the more difficult.

If this is your situation, it would probably behoove you to hire a competent web developer (ahem…like yours truly, perhaps…) to design an ecommerce system which fits your existing model.

You should, however, fully understand the difficulties with using your own solution.

First - it’s not cheap. Programming is a laborious, time consuming process. At a minimum, plan on spending upwards of $3,000.00 for the programming alone. This will be much more once you add in graphics, logos, content, data entry, etc.

Second - the web changes, technology changes, bad guys get smarter and peoples tastes evolve. What works for you today may not work tomorrow, and may be downright dangerous. You should plan to maintain n ongoing relationship with your web developer to update your site, keep security holes plugged, etc.

So, maybe, it would be better to just buy a shopping cart script and model your business around the way in which your shopping cart does things.

This is fine if you are just starting out. There are some great shopping cart scripts out there, some of them are even free.

The problems you may experience are two-fold.

First - installable scripts, by definition, must be installed. If you are fairly tech savvy and have a friendly (cooperative) web host, this may not be a problem. If not, it could be messy.

Secondly - You should ENSURE that you keep your script updated to the latest version. Security is a big factor in ecommerce, and bad guys abound. In many ways, you will be like the defenders of the Alamo - surrounded and under siege. Vigilance is essential.

Another option, if you are just starting out, or you are moving away from the installable script thing, is to use what is called a hosted shopping cart.

A hosted shopping cart is one which is already installed on a web server. It’s just a matter of signing up, signing in, configuring your store, and selling your products.

A good hosted shopping cart - like <shameless plug> 123 eCart Online Storefronts </shameless plug> will give you the flexibility to set up your store to fit in with your existing business model, be easy to configure, and secure.

One of the benefits of using the hosted shopping cart option is that updates, patches, security fixes are automatically applied to your store. As the technology evolves, so does your store.

Another benefit is the time savings. Your time is better spent on promoting your store and filling orders. Let others worry about the software, the server, and the bad guys.

Finally, less up front costs, and less  maintenance costs over time.