Your Ultimate Cart.

[Sepia]

Hello All.
I'm involved in the development of a strart-up which will be selling digital product to a global market. Security and back-end itemised invoicing and tracking are essential.
I have been reading the posts for a while and an researching the best low-budget shopping carts. I need to know what your top-of-mind preferred shopping cart application would be for my application, and why? All responses will be appreciated - thanks for your time!

[cinnamon9691]

This is a question that pops up a lot on this and other forums. I'm not trying to be glib, but what has your research shown you? Most carts offer some sort of free trial period for clients to get under the hood and try them out. Digital products are pretty common and most carts (free and otherwise) offer digital product support. Also, what do you consider "low-budget"? Mostly any answer will be based on subjective information since we really don't fully understand your businesses needs.

The best information I can give you is to start a list of carts that have your basic requirements. Start a free trial or explore the demo of those carts fully. Upload and download products, use the back end management tools, go through the checkout process of these carts on different browsers and you can start narrowing down your list.

I understand this isn't really the answer to your question, but there will be many different opinions here and the only one that really matters for your business will be yours.

[Sepia]

Hi there, and thanks for the reply...
AT the moment I seem to be looking at X-Cart and CRE Loaded, rightly or wrongly. The former does not seem to have a free version though. I agree with you in terms of getting under the hood of the system, I suppose it is just a time issue...
Having just met with my developer, I now understand that we actually may be looking for a 'payment gateway' application as the cart is something we can build on our side. My (very) brief research int this indicates that the gateway can often cost as much as the cart and gateway package, so I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Any further view on this?
Thanks for your time.

[cinnamon9691]

Both X-cart and cre-loaded have good user bases and you should be able to find reviews from clients here about them both. Below you will find the 30-trial for x-cart and the cre-loaded demo.

30-day trial of x-cart:
http://www.x-cart.com/downloadable_demo.html

Cre-loaded cart demos:
http://www.creloaded.com/pages.php?pID=96&CDpath=1

As for your question about payment gateways you should read the following article on sitepoint about the basics of payment gateways. It's a good read for somebody just starting up and I hope it helps!

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/mer...ccount-review/

Goodluck!
-Sherri

[Sepia]

Thanks cinnamon9691, I appreciate your input and the super-helpful article. Our particular situation involves online music sales, where a single unit could possibly cost no more than US$1.00. The costs involved with regard to PayPal etc make the payment options prohibitive for such low value transactions.
Knowing what I know (which is not as much as you do), the cart option looks like a more sensible option as the 'transactional' costs appear to be lower - most money is spent upfront to purchase the application/package.
Do you have any further views on this?
Many thanks.