Shopping Cart Help

Hi All,
I currently have a 'mail order' online bookstore located in Melbourne, Australia. I'm looking to upgrade my site to include a shopping cart. However I have absolutely no idea where to start!
I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to which path to take. Paid shopping carts v Free shopping carts. What would be the best one, and easiest one to use and implement on my site.
I have basic knowledge of html, so am wondering should I attempt to do this myself, or actually pay someone to set this up for me? And if so, how much does that service normally cost?
Also any thoughts or suggestions about layout and design of the site would be greatly appreciated as I'm still pretty new to the whole web design thang!!!
Thanks so much,
Lisa

zencart or oscommerce are excellent options for what you want and both are free scripts

There are many types of shopping carts out there. One time fee, free, monthly, and just about everything in between. I work for a shopping cart development company and I would recommend asking yourself these questions:

What is my monthly budget for a shopping cart? This will included paying a programmer/developer to maintain the cart, hosting costs, merchant transaction fees, and monthly hosting costs.

How much support do you need? Think about if there's an issue with your shopping cart. What level of support service are you comfortable with: email only, forum only, weekday phone, or 24/7 support. How imperative is it to get your cart back up and running?

What are the features you will need? Make a list and start visiting shopping cart websites to compare your needed features to feature lists. If you can't find your features, start making Google searches on the features that you need or try contacting the cart company to check available feature sets. This is a good litmus test for their service also.

Since every shopping cart client is different in ecommerce skill sets, it's really hard to answer the 'ease of use' statement. 'Ease of use' is going to greatly differ between any two shopping cart clients. While many use Oscommerce and Zencart, others find it cumbersome and beyond their skills.

I would advise that you lurk on some of the shopping cart forums, Monstercommerce, Oscommerce, Zencart, Cubecart, Modular Merchant, Squirrelcart, Volusion, and many more have forums where you can register and ask questions of people already using the software. Also, many carts offer free demos of the admin and checkout area take advantage of these demos and see how easy it is for you.

Cost will vary greatly depending on what you need. Contact different solutions and ask questions about pricing, installation, design, support, and customization. There are many solutions out there and several should be very flexible around your needs.

I hope this information helps get you off on finding your solution. Goodluck!

if i can offer any assistance feel free to contact me and ill help you figure out what is best for your needs

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MamawDenise

zencart or oscommerce are excellent options for what you want and both are free scripts

---

osCommerce and zencart are very difficult to customize. You will need PHP language skills to customize their design. So, I don't recommend them.

not if you have the skills required and by doing so you get exactly what you need in a site, i have edited hundreds of ecommerce sites of course I'm well versed in php, asp and the rest but he stated he wanted someone to maintain them anyway

It really depends how much work you personally are willing to put into the project. Anyone can learn enough html and php to customize their own cart and some are less complicated than others. I use Cube Cart for mine having tried Zen and OSC. I settled on Cube Cart mainly because the support forum was more responsive.

I think in terms of free shopping carts I just use PayPal but paid carts usually offer more features and are a little more robust than free ones me I prefer

http://www.yourcart.com/app/?pr=78&id=79818

Its all a matter of determining your budget and needs.

All that you need it's a custom development service, that help you to integrate shopping cart into your website. I know only two shopping cart solutions that provide this - it's a low cost shooping cart and custom development from CS-Cart shopping cart software and X-Cart shopping cart software. But X-Cart - $500 and $25/hour for customising

If you know basic HTML you wouldn't have any problems customizing the template for AspDotNetStoreFront. It's worth checking out their online demo at www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/demo.aspx.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SteveIrw

osCommerce and zencart are very difficult to customize. You will need PHP language skills to customize their design. So, I don't recommend them.

---

You aint lying!!!

I used osCommerce before switching to a modular solution (Joomla/Virtuemart).

Do your research before doing the investment.

If you decided doing it yourself, i can recommend Mals. It's not the best option but only HTML knowledge needed.

Like others stated Free PHP solutions required from basic to advantage PHP knowledge, and i wouldnt use these options with basic HTML knowledge

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MamawDenise

zencart or oscommerce are excellent options for what you want and both are free scripts

---

I wouldnt put the two together. Zen is based on osc originally...but Zen Uses a dynamic template structure like CRE. So it is not as static of a design change as oscommerce pages....but if you know the structure you are set...or just by a template from templatemonster or algozone etc for zen.