Need a Reccomendation for Software/Shopping cart builder

[adamkingadam]

Hello!

I am trying to build a e-commerce site for our company that will sell toner and ink cartridges. So far I have not come across anything affordable that will work well with my specific industry. With toner cartridges there will be alot of cross referencing between cartridges that work on multiple models, 1,000s of different models and a lot of different categories.

I am looking for something that will give me a clean look, maybe some type of drop down menus that will make product searches easy, thereby minimizing the amount of sub-categories that I would need for multiple models of toner. Any recommendations would be appreciated, we are a small business and cannot afford the high pricing on a custom site that is usually required for this type of business.

[ascholfield]

Hello adamkingadam,

I know there are a lot of software solutions out there for ecommerce carts.

i don't have a lot of experience with too many of them however i can list out a few good free and not free ones for you:

free:
OsCommerce
Open for business

non-free
aspdotnetstorefront $1295 for the the average version
ablecommerce $995

[Fakingit]

One good way to research this is to look at your competition. Just do searches for your products and see what shopping cart they are using. For this kind of inventory you need something that of course you can upload a large data base. Most of the major hosted solutions can handle this. However, look forward to hiring a developer to tweak whatever you get, in terms of search features. These are usually custom features. Also as far as the look goes, clean is easy. I will make a recommendation based on SEO features and good customer support and reasonable cost to design your site with SEO-Cart. This has the best structure for organic search results, real html pages and auto generated meta tags, which will be a big help if you have a large catalog. It will save hundreds of hours of work.

This company has another very strong suit that will help you, and that is you have to get a design anyway. You can get a basic clean template for $200 but if you have this kind of very specific need you should get the template designed specifically for your needs. Also, they can import an entire product catalogue from another store for only $200 so I know that they can inexpensively help you customize your product database so it easily integrates with your shopping cart. It's essential the data base is put together to conform to your presentation. Also, they can customize your search functions for an hourly rate.

It's still a ton cheaper than going out and paying a developer and a software provider to do the same work.

If you try and do this yourself -- probably for the search function you will still need some freelance help. But it depends on whether you have any support there because the big job is getting the product data base together - with all the options --

SEO-cart has very easy option functions, the easiest I have seen, and you can have unlimited options and images.

You will have to get the enterprise edition of whatever solution you opt for. But for that catalog I recommend SEO-cart because the auto-tag generator will be a huge help with that many products and options. Also, the parameters you have are not that difficult really to customize. Once you get up and running this is an economical solution too and integrates with major payment methods

[jacksan]

Check out zeuscart it's open source ecommerce software search engine friendly and easy to modify. Zeuscart provide good support and secure services ever, try it!

[tobylee02]

we have a site in aimed at the UK and the rest of Europe. If you use either of these shopping baskets can you charge in UK pounds