E-commerce shopping carts with CMS
My current site is www.drcarol.com
Its on www.volusion.com software
Its the 5th unsuccessful site I have had
I am a veterinarian in Ohio and am trying to find a solution for my e-commerce web site with a very good shopping cart and the ability to provide information, SEO, HTML, SEO friendly optimized pages that get good organic ranking , a 2.0 community. I eventually want to be able to do pod casting, video blogging, blogs and all the rest to create a wonderful user friendly site for dog and cat lovers on which sales are generated. My budget is limited as I am non profit and I have looked at many carts from volusion, apple pie to X-cart to product cart and shop site pro.
I would like to create a site on which I can grow and my examples of successful sites I might want to mimic on a small basis would be something affordable but similar to www.drsfostersmith.com and www.800petmeds.com
For a community site www.dogster.com and www.eons.com I think are excellant and would like to begin with a much smaller, affordable version
I thank you in advance and my email address is [email protected]
Carol Osborne
CS-CART Ecommerce Solution
I have been through many different experiences, 2 years ago I started building my first online store on Yahoo stores. Found that their application was difficult to modify and was not very flexible for a beginner.
I then went to Volusion and found their application to be much better than what Yahoo offered. I stayed with them for about a year, but the amount of money I was paying out, made it unfeasible to continue paying almost $90+/month.
Then came the open-source... I figured why not try oscommerce. After many hours of continuous adding of modules, I found CRE Loaded which had an almost turn key version of oscommerce. CRE Loaded is a pretty good piece, for someone selling normal material products. Doesn't require much knowledge of .php, easy to install, and has a wide variety of add-on templates available through a number of different online stores.
Unfortunately, CRE Loaded doesn't have a solid offline credit card processing module (kind of buggy) and their customer support is way behind the norm and somewhat unacceptable.
I found CS-Cart Ecommerce Solution as the best solution so far. Although to software requires a license purchase for about $195, it is a one time fee and doesn't come back. Customer support has been wonderful and timely. CS-Cart offers many flexibilities, and is loaded with ecommerce features to include downloadable product capabilities.
I hope the above sheds some light to your concerns. My budget has been somewhat tight and dependant on sales I make. I would strongly recommend CS-Cart.