How to choose a shopping cart.

There is a big choice of shopping carts all over the internet and sometimes it's rather difficult to choose the one.
In this article we will guide you how to choose a shopping cart.
One of the main features of any shopping cart is user-friendly interface for the shoppers. They should not guess how they can add products to the cart and purchase them.
People do not like filling the forms. Your shopping cart should not require the shoppers to be registered.
The other important thing is the shoppers should like the design of your shopping cart. It will be a big plus if the shopping cart is based on templates.
If you follow the simple rules above you can increase your sales.

Free shopping carts. Some people like free shopping carts others don't. Some developers of free shopping carts pay less attention to the security.
As a result a free shopping cart can have security problems.

The most popular free shopping carts are:
osCommerce (URL address blocked: See forum rules)
Zen Cart (URL address blocked: See forum rules)
Those shopping carts are rather powerful but from the other hand sometimes it's difficult to set them up.

Commercial shopping carts. They are more professional as a rule. The developers are more interested in developing them.
One of the commercial shopping carts is 1st ProCommerce ((URL address blocked: See forum rules)). You can sell digital downloads and merchandise using this shopping cart.

More expencive commercial shopping carts are Cart32 ((URL address blocked: See forum rules)) and ProStores ((URL address blocked: See forum rules)).

P.S. This is my own opinion. If you have anything to add you can reply to this post.

In our experience customers who have custom carts written are obviously happier with their carts and are typically more successful.

The canned carts only work for so long and typically don't allow enough customization for the future. An interesting note is that a lot of the economy carts, which have monthly fees and minimal up front costs, end up costing more than a custom cart over the lifetime of the site.

After seeing the results of clients 'renting' carts and having little customization flexibility we realized that it's not a good long term strategy. In addition, over a 3-5 year period they end up spending a lot more money and are stuck with that provider!

Some of our clients took loans out to buy custom carts instead of renting one. They ended up paying about the same monthly fees but actually own the cart and aren't stuck with one provider.

i used OScommerce before, was excellent. its free too ! and the most important things ... SEO friendly(contributions installed)

I've used osCommerce before but it's very difficult to manage and takes a lot of time to customize storefront design. For my projects I started using Avactis shopping cart which is easy to manage for my clients without tech experience. Also Avactis shopping cart allows easy storefront design customization and after software updates no need to work on storefront design again. osCommerce updates are painful. After update you should redo your storefront design again.

Hello

I use SumCart Shopping Cart (sumcart.com)
Administration panel is realy very nice easy and intuitive.
Has anybody had using it?