New Shopping Cart

[AaronConway]

Hi all,

I've been very busy in my new job this past month. One of my priorities now is searching for a shopping cart for two of our businesses. I thought that I had found the answer in BigCommerce but I've found a few limitations in setting up multiple product options. We are looking for an "out of the box" solution because we don't want to spend thousands on an outside web designer for customization. One business is a screen printer and the other does engraving.

Here's a quick run down on some the features we need:
-1 page checkout
-ability for customer to upload file from product page
-unlimited options on products
-customer specified delivery date
-multiple payment options i.e. credit card, net 30, etc
-retail/wholesale prices
-quantity discount pricing
-seo friendly

I would appreciate any recommendations anybody has.

Thanks,

Aaron

[vangogh]

You can probably find most of the requirements you need in just about any cart. Maybe not all of your requirements, but most. However know that free or low cost shopping carts are usually that way because a certain amount of customization is assumed. If you don't want to hire someone to customize the cart then you pay more for the cart.

Also know that your shopping cart can only so so much in terms of seo. No cart will make your pages show up well in search results by defaults. No software can seo itself. The software only provides a foundation for you to do your own seo. It's important, but it won't help you rank by itself.

Here's a list of some open source shopping carts (http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/open-source-e-commerce-shopping-carts-best-of/). I think they'll all be free, but having worked on a few of them I can tell you you'll either need to be willing to work on them yourself or you'll end up hiring someone to work on it for you.

[AaronConway]

Thanks vangogh. They don't mind paying (and expect to pay) for the cart or a monthly fee but they don't want to spend $5000 right out of the gate for a custom cart. Like I said, I thought I had a winner with BigCommerce because it's the only one I found that let's the customer upload a file at the product level but they're lacking in the area of multiple product options. The problem I've run into is for the screen printing company. If a customer is buying long sleeve shirts here's their available options:

Shirt colors-20, shirt sizes-6, print locations-6, ink colors for each of the 6 print locations-at least 12

With all these options and the way BigCommerce handles the options you end up with over a million different variations.

[vangogh]

I think I misunderstood a little about the money in your first post. I wasn't thinking you would have someone develop a custom shopping cart for you. I was thinking more of choosing a free or low cost cart and then having someone customize the design and tweak the functionality. That shouldn't cost $5,000. It would depend a little on how much customization you needed, but I would think it would be more like $1,000 - $2,000, though it could even be under $1,000 depending on what you'd need done.

Keep in mind that while something like BigCommerce sounds nice, within a year or possibly two you'll likely end up spending more money than you would had you hired someone to customize one of the free carts and you'll still have to keep paying. Your ecommerce solution is also under someone else's control. That could still be the right choice for you, but it's worth considering both the ongoing cost and control.