Choosing a shopping cart - Yahoo Stores vs others

[2silverwings]

I am starting a small niche health products e-commerce business. I am considering Yahoo Stores. Wondering if anyone has any feedback about positives or negatives about using Yahoo Stores.

I don't have advanced HTML skills. I considered ZenCart but it overwhelmed me, because I couldn't understand a lot of the jargon they used to talk about things (PHP? Servers? Huh?)

At the same time, I don't want a completely cookie-cutter site that screams "Yahoo".

I am on a budget - A very small budget. I am creative but like I said I'm not a super-techie.

YahooStores is appealing in its offering an easy way to create and edit your store, and the ability to be an all-in-one e-commerce solution (I.e. I can host there, use their tools for design, manage inventory, etc)

Any feedback?

[InfoSourcing]

Hi

If you are starting e-Commerce business and not ready to spend time and money to understand and invest into ebusiness then Yahoo stores is first step in putting together the inventory and trying to market on Yahoo shopping.

But over period of time you will start to relaize that you are paying higher percentage per transaction for credit cards and orders placed online at which point you will be ready to host it with other e-commerce solutions like Volusion, ASPDotnetStorefront, Storefront.net and Miva merchants ...

[Elegant]

Here Here. I agree with InfoSourcing; It all depends on your budget. Do your homework first before making a decision. Either/or, what ever you choose, it’s a huge commitment both in time and money. Careful planning is key; it took us five months before making our choice and decided build a web site in house.

But whatever you choose though, there’s plenty of support, including this forum. And zencart is a pretty good shopping cart although we use oscommerce. It’s like riding a bike; once you get it, you get it.

Keep us informed!

[dvduval]

I have always used OSCommerce, which is free and open source. I have always no problem finding people that could customize it to fit my needs for a reasonable cost, so that is my recommendation.

I am not a big fan of Yahoo stores because of the limited nature of the hosting environment.

[InfoSourcing]

Dvduval I agree that osCommerce is free e-commerce software and it is quite powerful in its features and it is pretty good as long as every company has a php developer in-house or be able to get a reliable developer outside to implement and maintain the system.

Business owners who are focused on their core business may not have time to coordinate such things, they need out of the box applications that has powerful inventory control and crm capabilities so they can spend less time in maintaining and focus on core business ...

Also i haven't heard of any integration btwn osCommerce and accounting packages or third party packages such as Compiere which is also open source. So one has to really weigh in all those options ...

[roban]

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