Things I Learned About Shopping Carts

I recently decided it was time to renovate my 12-year-old http://www.tracertek.com web site.

We have been on the Internet for years and I’ve been through my share of shopping carts. This time around, I really decided to do my homework on our audio restoration and enhancement site because I wanted to make sure that I was happy with everything.

Along the way, I’ve picked up lots of useful information and, while jotting it down so I could keep things straight in my 45-year-old brain, I decided that this information might be of use to others who are staring down a similar long road.

First, let me make one thing clear. There are a heck of a lot of shopping cart solutions out there…and guess what…they’re all the best. Soon, the features all start to melt together, your eyes glaze over and your head begins to spin.

Fear not, for I have run down many of these roads so that you don’t have to. Here are a couple of tips that may help you avoid the timepit of despair that I have suffered through.

1. PERL Bad, PHP Good.- As you start to research shopping carts, one question can eliminate a large percentage of them right off the bat. “Do You Require PERL?” See, PERL is a set of tools that live on the host and are available for applications that run on that host. Think of them as a Rental Center for software. Your shopping cart says, “Hey, I need a ditch digger!” It yells over to PERL and says, “Hey, you got a ditch digger?” PERL says, “Yes, I do…here it is.” Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, because PERL is getting a little long in the tooth and is having trouble working and playing well together with today’s new platforms, the old horse is being put out to stud. In other words, hosts are beginning to shut down PERL and those web sites who depend on it are calling the Rental Center and getting a busy signal. And the bad thing? You don’t find out until your store just stops working. How many days can you go without orders on your store? Also remember…they’re not replacing PERL, just eliminating it. That’s why you look for stores that are 100% PHP based. PHP is like the Internet, where PERL is like the telegraph. PHP is stronger, faster, and more powerful than a speeding locomotive. If you ask a prospective shopping cart the PERL question and you see double talk and sweat in the reply email…run for the hills!

2. Promotional Rescue- Today, search engines are king. Almost nothing else matters. If your page comes up in the top 5 of the search engines, you get lots of business…if you don’t, don’t quit your day job. Many shopping carts talk a lot about promotion, but when you do research, you find out that most of that comes with an additional fee. Make sure that your shopping cart is SEO (search engine optimized) so that each of your pages also serves to promote the site for you.

3. Isn’t It Pretty?- Though the pretty and easy shopping carts appear to be the answer if you don’t have a bunch of experience with PHP, CSS, and XHTML they sure look nice at first. But what I found after a bit of investigation was the fact that these carts provide a very narrow path. As long as you do you business exactly as they want you to, things will probably work out okay. Unfortunately, because things are so “dumbed down”, you may find yourself quickly out of horsepower. These sites are also usually hosted and my #1 pet peeve with tech support was that every time I called with a problem, I had to listen to a 5 minute sales pitch for some add-on more expensive alternative. I hate when sales disguises itself as tech support.

4. It’s Hosted!- Here’s another thing I didn’t find out until it was too late. If you use a hosted solution, you’re sort of stuck there. By that, I mean that you spend weeks creating this store. You spend months getting things perfect and years paying fees to a company. Now the time comes to move on…for one reason or another and guess what? Your store goes bye-bye the day you leave. “Hello, square one? It’s me, the crying guy.” If you have a chance, try to get a shopping cart that you can take with you. It’s too much work to recreate something once you’ve lost it. Hosted shopping carts stay with the host and you’re sent packing.

5. Who Do You Know?- Probably goes without saying, but make sure you can link to at least the 3 big shippers (UPS, Fedex, and US Postal Service), and the major payment gateways. You link to shippers so that when your customer clicks on “Order This” it can quote them an accurate shipping charge. Customers expect this option, if you don’t have it, they may find a product elsewhere. The payment gateways handle charging your customers and making sure the money gets to you. Your shopping cart has to know what information to send to the banks via the payment gateways so your customers can be charged and you get your money. Make sure your shopping cart has ample support for these gateways…including Paypal…a big player in the credit card wars today.

6. Feeling Secure?- Having a secure site is very important if you’re asking folks to plug their credit cards into your site and purchase from you. Your customers know if your site is secure because most web browsers have a little Lock icon that lights up when a site is secure. Many customers won’t purchase without this lock. Investing in an SSL certificate is not very expensive, but be on the lookout for what happened to me. My host offered a $300 per year subscription for an SSL certificate or I could share an SSL for free. Of course, free sounded great until I realized that every time my customers clicked on “Buy This”, they were whisked to a secure site that didn’t even have my company’s name. Remember, folks who care about such things are already a little paranoid…try sending them to a site with a different name than your site to collect their credit card info. These folks watch Nightline and every news story about credit card fraud. Warning sirens ring out when this happens! Eventually, I ended up paying the 300 bucks; later to find out that I could have done this for about 20 bucks a year when I reached my final destination.

7. The Freebies- Lots of folks I talked to went with one of the free solutions. Free always sounds good to me, so I checked into them as well. “Free” is great! It doesn’t cost you anything, right? Well, not so fast there cowboy. The problem with a free store that has lots of free plug-ins written by lots of freethinkers becomes painfully obvious, once you start trying to piece this all together. See, because the various elements are written by 100 different guys of various skill levels, integration problems instantly rear their ugly head. If you do finally get something working with all of the various building blocks of these free solutions, you end up with 100 bricks in your foundation…none of which were designed to fit with the others. Trust me, if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this odyssey is that search engines hate it when things don’t quite fit together. And you pay the price in your web exposure once your site is “exposed”. If you now have to pay an “expert” to munge this all together for you out of the various pieces, you’ve now taken “free” to a whole new level. See, these guys don’t work for free and you basically end up with a site that might look good, but isn’t optimized for anything and costs you a lot more than “free”.

So, what’s left?

I narrowed the field down to 2 solutions…there may be others out there, but these were the two I settled on because they met the criteria I established during my research. X-Cart and ClickCartPro were the two finalists, so then just for fun, I called the companies. This is the final phase of my evaluation of any company. Can I actually talk to a human in the states if I need help?

After a few minutes with the folks from X-Cart, I quickly found out that, though I wasn’t able to find anything about PERL on their site, in fact, there are still peripheral parts of X-Cart that depend on PERL. Their product also uses a template system…I was a little foggy on the details, but it seems to me that in order to use their stuff, I have to learn additional commands. There are already about a million “commands” that I don’t know…did I really want to add a few hundred more?

I was surprised that when I called Kryptronic, I actually talked to a real breathing human being within seconds of making my call. I asked about PERL and got the right answer. I asked about my other checklist. The person I talked to took the time to explain each of my concerns and, by golly, they had the right answer there too. They didn’t have a product ranking system, which probably would be cool, but overall, they seem to have the most bang for the buck ($199) They also offered me something I didn’t know I wanted. There is a product out there called T-Hub and ClickCartPro has a driver for it. This is pretty cool. One of my major pet peeves is typing orders into 2 additional places every time I get one. I get this order…that’s already been typed…I might add, and I type it into my QuickBooks. Now I type that same information into my shipper’s page. On busy days, I get nothing done but typing. Not with T-Hub. I saw it on the Kryptronic XMOD (plug-in) page http://www.kryptronic.com/Software-XMODs. Now, when a customer places an order, I can instantly go from the shopping cart, to Quickbooks, to my shipper and even get the shipping information from FedEx, UPS and USPS downloaded back into the shopping cart so customers can check tracking information on their order…my fingers are so happy! It’s not cheap to add this XMOD and T-Hub…but it saves me hours each day and I’m worth it.

We all have our expertise…some of us make leather products, others are experts in woodworking. In my case, my expertise lies in helping folks restore records and tapes to a modern format minus the noise of age and poor recording techniques. I didn’t want to become an expert in shopping cart software, but I did want to sell my stuff to more people than just my mom.

Hope this helped you get up to speed.

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