Shopping Cart Reviews
There are an overwhelming number of shopping carts available, making it very hard to decide which is best. Some are sold as a hosted service (PayPal Standard, Google Checkout), others can be installed on most hosting services. We have done extensive research on shopping carts, and offer reviews to help you narrow down the field to a select number of shopping carts.
Generally most shopping carts are designed to be the core of your website. They can be linked in as a separate area of the website but generally the integration that is possible is limited to a link to the cart site. Some carts have a mechanism for doing a "Buy Now" button from a static website.
SonicSpider provides Installation and Customization packages for all of the reviewed carts.
There will be two basic categories of carts: Open Source** and Commercial.
In reviewing the shopping carts listed here, we have used the following requirements by which we selected the carts for this review:
Shopping Cart Review Requirements
- General
- Full source code is either available free or can be purchased.
- Active community or third party add-ons
- Payment Gateways
- Must support PayPal Website Payment Standard
- May support other PayPal solutions
- May support several other Gateway solutions
- Customization
- Generates CSS based pages for ease of design and styling
- Default style is usable
- Generally W3C compliant****. (Minor validation errors or none)
- Some customization can be done by an non-programmer or business owner
- Extensive customization can be done by an experienced programmer.
- Features
- Usable "out of the box"
- Well documented Installation
- Competitive range of features that range from the most basic to "everything but the kitchen sink"
Open Source** vs. Commercial
Software has been available using a number of different approaches: Shareware, Try-before-you-buy, freeware, and strictly commercial. Over the last 10 years a type of "freeware" has emerged called "open source" (click here for a more detailed discussion). These software development projects have become very popular and have developed an approach to creating and supporting software that can be a benefit to many businesses.
A Comparison of Approaches and Links to Reviews
- Pros
- Cost - Free
- Innovation - Generally large and active communities
- Quality - Rapid development and update cycles
- Standards - Often adheres to existing standards, giving you inter-operability and avoiding vendor lock-in.
- You have complete control of the source code and are independent of a vendor
- It it is not there, build it yourself. (or hire someone)
- Cons
- Support can range from great to poor. This is where an active community is important.
- Features depend on someone else wanting what you need and their willingness to build that feature into the product.
- Can require someone with more technical skills to get the most out of the product.
- Documentation can be sparse or incomplete.
- If the feature is missing, YOU have to build it or hire someone to build it for you.
- Pros
- A committed vendor and the profit motive
- Support is more consistent (not always better)
- Features driven by competition and the market place (the level of competition determines the scope of features)
- Generally more polished and complete documentation
- Cons
- Cost Money
- Your future depends on the vendor's success or failure - Vendor Lock-in.
- Updates are driven by the demands and pocketbooks of the many NOT by your businesses needs.
- May not adhere to most recent standards because they have an investment to protect.
- May not integrate with other projects and technologies.
So, which is best? Both, depending on your needs. If you are on a budget the open source carts might be a place to look first. Next, decide what features you need (hence the reason for these reviews, to help you on that task) and see what carts satisfy those needs. Once you have narrowed down your choices, review once again the above "Pros and Cons" and determine where you are most comfortable.
(And yes, we tend to be a bit biased toward open source..)
**Open Source - What does this mean?
The term "Open Source" has many different meanings depending on who you are talking to. For a complete overview of the concept visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
As it is used here, it means that the source code is freely available and that there are no hidden license fees or limitations of the features.
Why should you care? Basically this means that your shopping cart is completely owned by you and that you are free to alter the source code as you see fit. If you are a web developer this means that you can customize the cart beyond the available configuration features. If you are an owner, this means you are not dependent on a company for fixes, updates and enhancements. Keep in mind, as a matter of ethics and "good form", if you decide to use open source software, it is wise to make a contribution to the project. Your degree of generosity should reflect the value the software has to your company.
****W3C Validation - What does this mean?
Back in the early 90's there were the famous "Browser Wars" between Microsoft and Netscape. During this time each company created more and more proprietary and incompatible extensions to their browsers. People building websites (Web Developers and Designers) found themselves building two different websites for each browser. The Internet was quickly becoming a mess and it was bogging down progress, innovation, and making websites VERY expensive to build.
Then in 1994, the W3C was formed (World Wide Web Consortium) to try and address the growing problems. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines. Since then, the W3C has published more than 110 such standards, called W3C Recommendations. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software, and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.
One of the services of the W3C is their "Validation Tools" (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/#validators) that help web developers, web masters, and designers to insure compatibility with these standards. Using these tools you can check any website to see how compliant it is to these standards. SonicSpider is committed to supporting W3C standards a part of its goal of making the Web a universal business platform that is accessible to all people.
CSS Layout vs Table Layout
It is fairly easy to tell which of these layouts a site supports. First find the "View Source" menu while viewing the demo in question. If you see tables everywhere,it is a Table based Layout. Basically to be a true CSS layout and standards based, the table should ONLY be used for data, NOT for website structure. The base unit for a CSS Layout is the <div> tag. Using this tag and other similar tag components, a skilled CSS coder can take just about any basic layout and make it look entirely unique. (review this site, Zen Garden, for excellent examples)
The Bottom Line - Protecting Your Investment: For you, all of this means that your investment in a shopping cart will last longer and continue to be usable for many years IF that shopping cart's code is built to be compatible with these standards. It also means that ANY future browser or future version of an existing browser will display your shopping cart EXACTLY the same now and 10 years from now. There is one additional "feature" to compliance: the skills to alter or update your cart's "look and feel" will continue to be available. Proprietary systems can "sunset" and you can find yourself with no support and no one that wants to help you. Fancy templating systems can become out of date, Valid CSS never becomes out of date.