Shopping carts online are very common, but if you have never set one up they can seem daunting. There are more choices then you can shake a stick at and that can be the first hurdle you come to. To simplify the matter let's break them down a bit into simple categories. There are hosted or non-hosted carts. Hosted means that the cart provider hosts the carts and does all the technical stuff to make it all go. If you host the cart yourself (un-hosted) then you take on the job of dealing with technical issues or you have to hire someone to deal with them. So why not go with hosted? Your cart is on someone else's domain and so is all your traffic.
Free or paid: there many free solutions out there and a huge amount of paid solutions. Other categories to consider are open source or closed source and simple to full featured. In this article we will be focusing on our favorite carts which are free (un-hosted) open source shopping carts that we will install on our own domain. Even though we narrowed down the field to "free (un-hosted) open source shopping carts that we will install on our own domain" there are still a number of categories to continue to drill down though.
"So what does it all come down to? Wordpress is just more user friendly and more fun to use at this point..."
One important decision will be whether to go with a stand alone cart or a cart that is basically a plugin for another software like Joomla or Wordpress. A stand alone cart sounds nice at first as you are using a piece of software that is built from the ground up to do one thing, which is be a shopping cart. But is that really true? Not really, as you can not have a cart only without the cart being a large number of other things. Examples of these other features might be emailing invoices, creating web pages, monitoring traffic patterns, and well, being a web site and all that being a web site entails.
This year we are not going with a stand alone cart for this very reason. We have not felt that the stand alone carts we have seen or tired can keep up with the modern web features of web site software (CMS) like Wordpress or Joomla, so we are focusing on going with a plugin for either Joomla or Wordpress. At this point Wordpress is looking mighty fine. In our view, Joomla has suffered from not having an editor that is worth using for strict xhtml, at least in terms of ease of use and for other reasons also. The editor is where you create your pages and posts so that is a big deal. Plus the upgrade path for Joomla has been challenging to say the least. Joomla 1.7 has potentially rectified this however. So what does it all come down to? Wordpress is just more user friendly and more fun to use at this point (in our humble opinions) and we have used both extensively. The "power" of Joomla and the sophistication of the templates available has perhaps been eclipsed by Wordpress also. Just a year or two back might this might have been a very different story, and as far as we could tell, it was.
Ok, so we have drilled down to the idea that a plug in for Wordpress as our best choice, but what is available, will it do what is needed? And ya, what is needed?
What is available: The place to start is the plugins (Extend) directory on the Wordpress site. Plugins. Wow, over 17,000 plugins! A quick search for "shopping cart" brought up 18 pages of plugins. I guess we will have to take a deeper look eh? When it comes to choosing a theme, we might have to look even deeper.
What is needed: Ok, even though I can read minds and know the unknowable, we are going to have narrow down what is needed for your personal shopping cart to what I can write in this article. Yes, you will have to create your own list. Here is our list to help you get started.
We decided on installing and setting up an open source shopping cart on an open source web platform. For this we choose Wordpress (over Joomla) as the platform, and we choose to have a plugin to power the cart. We defined a list of what we are looking for in a shopping cart plugin to help us comparison shop and found the best place to begin our search for the plugin. Since each site owner is different and has their own needs, what they choose might be different. As you shop for your shop, keep keep an eye out for a theme to work with your cart and as a cart. Also, take note of the feaures of the plugin that are free and the ones that cost money. Like does having more than one images in a listing cost extra? Can you add bulk uploading of product for free or does that cost extras? Another thing to ponder is, do you want tight integration between the cart, blog and theme.
Below we made a comparison list for two cart plugins. Depending on the add-ons you choose you would change the price or the $0.00 to whatever the cost of the add-on is that you like.
WooCommerce: The plugin is free but how much is it going to cost to make it into your dream cart?
WP-Commerce: The plugin is free but how much is it going to cost to make it into your dream cart?
WP Online Store: The plugin is free but how much is it going to cost to make it into your dream cart?
1Wordpress: Plugins to search for shopping carts or ecommerce...
2WooCommerce: Free Shopping Cart Plugin for Wordpress...
3WP-Commerce: Free Shopping Cart Plugin for Wordpress...
4WP Online Store: Free Shopping Cart Plugin for Wordpress...
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