There are a number of different shopping cart software to choose from on the internet, from the online store that is designed for 1-10 products all the way up to software handling millions of products.
We’ve personally worked with clients selling 1 product, or our largest client who had 1.4 Million products in their store. Each software serves its own purpose, but here is a quick rundown on what we suggest for our clients, and why.
WordPress eCommerce Stores
WordPress is an amazing content management system, and one of the biggest features is it’s seemly unending list of plugins available for online stores.
WooCommerce is probably the most known WordPress shopping cart system and it’s a great tool to work with. All the products are stored on your web hosting account and as such you have full control over everything. If you need to customize something, it can be done without much of a problem. You can design a custom look and feel, or you can choose from thousands of pre-built Themes and Designs (free or commercial design).
Ecwid touts itself as the #1 Free Shopping Cart & Online Store Solution and with more than 900,000 installations, it’s easy to see why! It started in 2009 by the same folks that make X-Cart Shopping Cart (see further down this page).
The nice thing about Ecwid is that it keeps your online store and your WordPress website separate. Ecwid resides on the cloud, so you know your data will be served fast! We love Ecwid for its ease of use!
Magento eCommerce Solution
To say that Magento is popular is an understatement! If you rewind the clock about 10-15 years ago there were really two shopping carts that people would choose from – osCommerce (long since dead due to lack of updates and too many hackers), and then there’s Magento.
The big downfall with Magento’s Community Version however was that you needed a web designer that understood the software architecture, and that means it became expensive to do anything.
Going back just a few years Magento took a big leap forward and started offering Magento Enterprise Version, and it’s used by many large companies, but be prepared to open the wallet as it’s not cheap. The last time we checked, Magento Enterprise was running about $18,000/year.
X-Cart Shopping Cart
Here’s one of our favorite shopping carts. We have been working with it since it first started back in 2000.
Our own Conor Treacy has been very active in the X-Cart Online Forums since that time providing help and web hosting assistance to countless users. He’s even written part of the original manual/guide when X-Cart was first starting out.
Anything you can dream of, you can do with X-cart! When we talked about the 1.4 Million product shopping cart, this is the software we choose to implement it with.
We developed a complete site that not only showed products but also checked inventory for products at 14 different warehouses and provided shipping pricing from each location in order for users to get the best possible price. It was a large project, but with minimal maintenance, the system continues to work as originally designed!
What Shopping Cart Do I Pick?
There are hundreds of different systems out there, and each one is designed for its own task. Big Red SEO can help you decide which is the right direction for you whether it’s using one of the above software outlined or something completely different for your unique needs.
Give us a buzz today at (402) 522-6468 to chat about your exciting shopping cart website design project.