Ecommerce
Webika Design is third part developer company for Pinnacle cart. We also support Magento Commerce, Business Catalyst, BV Commerce, Storefront, Word Press, Joomla, and Zen Cart.
We understand how hard it can be to choose the right shopping cart solution for you ecommerce site. We created 8 steps that will help you to select the proper ecommerce solution.
Before you select shopping cart, you would need to figure out how much you want to spend on shopping cart software.
Paid shopping carts (Licensed): Pinnacle Cart, Storefront, and BV Commerce
The shopping cart license starts from $789. The benefit of full source shopping cart is that you own it. You can customize and design it anyway you want . For any store that requires customization full source shopping cart is required.
Paid shopping carts (Hosted Solution): Pinnacle Cart, Business Catalyst
This option is very affordable, because the hosting company is responsible for the support and the hosted solution starts from $29 a month. Unfortunately, hosted solution does not give a permission to use the source code , so the customization of the store will be impossible.
Free shopping cart: Magento Commerce, Zen Cart, Word Press, Joomla, Mamba
These shopping carts are one of the best on the market. Magento offers huge variety of features, add-ons and plug-ins. Most of free shopping carts have great base of public support such as forums, groups and message boards. Here is the downside: nobody is responsible for free shopping cart, so if you find some “bugs” in your shopping cart, you would need to fix it on your own or hire development company.
Some of the shopping carts are very hard to customize and it requires time and money. Before selecting the shopping cart solution, make sure to have the list of special features that you would like to add to your cart. You can get a quote on how much it will cost and how long it will take to customize it.
Most of the helpful information you can find on the shopping carts are public forums, message boards and groups. If the shopping cart does not provide public forum than the development company probably provides paid phone support.
Check the full list of features and compare it with different shopping carts. We recommend to check marketing features which will help you to promote your products on the web. Some of the features are: electronic products, wholesale levels, product reviews.
Nowadays the shopping carts have standard features that help your website to get better position in search engines. Most valuable features are: URL search engine rewriter, Google Site Map, Meta title, description, keyword editors for the product and category pages. The website optimization is the vital step in your business success.
Before selecting shopping cart, try demo version of the back end and front end. Most of the shopping carts offering back end demo trials.
Ecommerce hosting is much different than HTML website hosting. It requires bigger space on the server and the database where the products will be stored. The hosting company will need to have backup service, email service and file manager service. The standard ecommerce hosting starts from $40/month.
In order to have secure transaction on your website, the hosting company will install a Secure Socket Certificate . This means that every time the customer types their credit card info and clicks submit, the information will be coded and transferred to the payment transaction company. The SSL starts from $40 a year. Payment gateway is company that gives you the opportunity to accept credit cards on your website. Before you sign up with any payment gateway, make sure that the shopping cart software supports this gateway. The most popular are Authorize.net, Paymetech, Prolific payment solutions, Trust commerce.
