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

Grrr, the timeout on this forum is waaayyyy too short!!

I lost my lengthy post.

Well, anyway. Have you tried Joomla! and/or Wordpress?

I use Joomla with Virtuemart (an ecommerce solution) on our triathlon site. There are tons of great extensions available for Joomla. Wordpress is a wonderful Blogging option with excellent options as well.

Take a look at the Joomla Extension area for some ideas.

The only unfortunate thing about Virtuemart is that the community is not nearly as involved as osCommerce or the like. It is very good though.

We use a modified version of CS-Cart.

It could well be what you are looking for!

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.

I think you are not allowed to do offline credit card processing, i mean to save it on shared hosting. This option only available for big companies who can own their own secure network

i use both cs-cart and joomla with virtuemart. for a simple shop i would suggest virtue mart, but the VM fourm is slow with activity. I love my cs-cart shop, it is very easy to use, the support is excellent and the forum is hopping. I know people like to go the free route, but ive been doing this for along time and free is great but i would rather pay for software and be very happy and keep my progress moving.

I have a customized cart, which can be customized for you totally

edit by admin, you may not advertise or solicit business on these forums. Thank you

i just wanted to tell you your triathlon website ha many broken links, looks nice but it is unfortunate i wanetd to try it out,

Instead of trying differnet shopping carts, I recommend you to find a web developer in your area and get a custom built search engine friendly shopping cart.

You can also find good freelance programmers and web development companies at elance.com

Using a shopping cart might seem expensive, but wait until you hire a developer to build on something like Joomla or Wordpress. You will be rebuilding the wheel. These are basic CMS systems and while they can have shopping elements included, they aren't really built around the functionality of a shopping cart and you will spend quite a bit making them so. You would also have to be very careful about how you hosted credit card information, as most developers building around a CMS will not do this properly.

If you are looking to add social elements to your site, you might want to keep a Volusion site and then have a link on your site that goes to a forum.

I also think Joomla with VirtueMart is a good choice. I have also used ECJC for Joomla which is a modified version of OSCommerce. Joomla has a lot of the features you mentioned and is open source so it would be good for your non-profit. When I make stand alone eCommerce sites, I like to use Zen Cart.