?3dCart, Magento, Volusion, Zen Cart? Looking for recommendations based on my situation.

[PEnterprises]

I have done a ton of research trying to figure this out but still need help and clarification. My strength is marketing and not the technical aspects of ecommerce cms etc. I am ignorant in this area and don't mind if you explain to me like a 5 year old. I am ready to take my marketing knowledge and creativity to ecommerce but this one aspect is stopping me. I really want to understand this and would be appreciative of the option to do a skype instant message session where I would pay you for your time to ask for clarification.

I will explain my situation so you can better understand where I am coming from and can recommend something appropriately.

My ecommerce stores run between my own and my clients range from motorcycle, supplement and fitness equipment stores. None of the stores are very large with the biggest one having about 150 products. Mainly I am looking for a mix between an economical solution combined with being easy to use and great for search engine visibility.

I have a lot of questions here and appreciate in advance anyone reading all of this and helping.

1. Am I correct in my understanding that I basically have 3 options when doing ecommerce. One is I can go to a company like 3d cart or volusion and they can provide the merchant account, ssl cert, the cart and free and paid templates ready to go? Two is getting free cart software such as Magento or OScommerce etc. The third option is paid cart software like zen cart or others. Is that my main options?
2. Let's say I was to use 3d cart. What kind of cart platform will I be using then? One they created? Or do they use a (free/paid) solution like I talked about in question 1?
3. Is the main advantage of using a company like 3dcart and volusion the fact that they integrate many things into one? With Magento would I need a developer to customize my theme to integrate all those things?
4. Are there some major disadvantages to using companies like 3d cart?
5. How does the process and advantages work when using a solution like Magento or OScommerce. So for example I decide to use the Magento free platform. Am I then able to hire a designer to create a site from scratch that will work with the Magento platform? Or I could also go to template monster and purchase a theme already made and have it customized by someone?
6. Also what about paid cart software like zen cart etc? Why would I use that over the others? Would I also then hire a designer to create a site that works with zen cart or purchase a template made then customize?
7. Are you able to create almost ANY structure and design for a site no matter what its cart platform is? For example, although I would make a few changes to this site I think it's very close to a great site from a design/conversion standpoint. http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/ . Lets say for example I was using any one of the options I have so far mentioned. Would I be able to just tell a designer/developer that I have magento,3dcart, zencart etc and tell him I would like that type of layout for example?
8. How would I know how certain cart platforms are coded? Does that even make sense? For example I have created and ranked many sites and tested quite a bit also. I have always noticed that very clean basic static html sites have almost always ranked better and faster for me. Do these platforms come built a certain way such as html or (I don't even know what the names of other options are). Or does it not come as anything and when I have the site built I determine how I want it built?

Also if you have any suggested reading for me I would be appreciative. Thank you for the help.

Jake

[Njnbiure45r4]

It relies upon upon the level of answer integration. Volusion simply makes use of a lame "share this" button. I surely might write a blog put up at the distinctive ranges of social sharing like bestespressobeans.net. Not all share buttons are created same.

[Adlanera]

With respect to the fees of changing buying carts, I agree the expenses would be excessive but in case you honestly have full manage over your URL structures, there might be zero loss from 301s as you can see here on hunting apps. The shape I am working on putting in is mysite.Com/keep/product name.

[iung]

For simple stores with less than a hundred products, we use Concrete5 cms; the ecommerce addon is easy to use and the whole thing is good for SEO.

[CherieP]

Hey AHH888,

Wondering what you ended up doing? We're just on wordpress now with a plugin for the cart but are considering volusion. My main concern is loosing the great SEO we have with our wordpress site right now since one or the other will have to be on a subdomain?

[kwoolf]

Late to the party here. I'm a Magento user with only about 30 products. The reasons I chose Magneto is for it's hangling of multiple languages. It is by far (and I mean really far) the best at handling multiple languages and maintain continuity as far as design, functionality, and SEO.

This leads me to my second reason: Extremely SEO friendly! I've worked with or demoed shopping carts for Joomla, Wordpress, Modx, and other hosted solutions. Magento can be (actually it must be) customized to do anything you want, like localized checkout process, automatic template switching for holiday promotions, e-mail notifications for any action, custom invoices, and the list goes on. Really, the only limits are either your programming skills or your budget.

About resources, I have to disagree with Ryan on this one. I run my instance on Rochen reseller hosting without issues, granted my site is fairly low traffic given that it's for catering and frozen delivery. But I put out mid-90's on both YSlow and PageSpeed, and that's something I don't see very often with other platforms.

Anyway, if you haven't committed, I do suggest getting to know Magento, but you might need to hire a professional firm to handle development.

Kevin

[LadyApollo]

As a retailer i have used actinic, interspire, oscommerce and am soon to release a magento store.

Interspire i believe is now retired and their support for the product was rubbish which was such a pity as it was so easy to use. Actinic are well behind the curvea nd the software was very buggy. oscommerce was a pain  but magento i have found to be really versatile and really not so complicated as people say to use.

You can have a designer re-skin it from scratch, buy a template or buy a template close to what your looking for and then just get it modified - this can save a bit of money.  There are loads of extensions that are quite simple to install using Magento connect .

The only downside is it is resource hungry, you'll need a dedicated server to really give it the juice it needs and for us the order processing was hideously longwinded - but there are extensions that can help abbreviate it.

One of the hardest things for us was finding a cart that ticked all the usual boxes but also one thats workflow somewhat resembled ours - you don't want to reinvent all your warehouse pick-pack procedures just 'cos your software says so!

Anyway that’s my personal take. HTH.

[zeepartner]

i have a few customers now that work with magento. they're all satisfied and as far as i can see it's pretty much optimised out of the box already. you can tweak title tags, urls, meta descriptions, on page copy and i've not seen any duplicate content issues. definitely the solution i would chose, were i to open an ecommerce.

[AHH888]

Hey Lux,

Hope you can provide some advice since you worked at Volusion. We are using Volusion right now, it was fairly easy to set up but we have now grown to the point where we need to customize the shopping cart and add a blog (they only allow subdomains, which google treats as a seperate domain). We also need to integrate 3rd party apps like freight calculators and Powerreviews, but do not have access to the back end coding, neither FTP SQL support...

I'm thinking we may need to start a domain and build from scratch, as we've invested tremendous resources into SEO and do not want a big hit to our rankings. Any recommendations from you on which platform and shopping cart to use?

Some quick notes on our site:

• 1 year old

• 1000 sku but will need to expand to 10,000 in the future

• No IT professional (we will need to hire one in the future)

[RyanKent]

Is ZenCart not listed because you don't like the cart? Or have you not worked with the software?

[LuxWork]

I think this brings up a great point about cost of ownership/maintenance. If you need to keep paying people to "fix things"- that really sucks.

Thats why I dont recommend magento to most people, cause I just hear it takes a ton of work to get it setup.

Simple is usually better, but attention needs to be paid on requirements like if you need special reporting, customer features, custom product templates, inventory management and other things that are critical to your business.

[LuxWork]

I havent looked at 3d cart in a while. I might check it out to see what they are doing.

[LuxWork]

1. It depends upon the level of solution integration. Volusion just uses a lame "share this" button. I actually might write a blog post on the different levels of social sharing. Not all share buttons are created equal. Either way yes, a developer can generally add on the proper integration if the ecommerce allows it. It sometimes requires some advanced changes to the template for all social button integration.

2. Yah I would say 50-1000 products is about the same. That is about 20 categories with 50 products in each category (about average).

3. My picks

#1 interspire

#2 volusion/big commerce

#3 shopify

#4 magento

[LuxWork]

Re "Forget about CMS"
My comment is in regards to getting an ecommerce solution that has a blog function built in. The Shopify blog system is worthless and has next to zero customizations. I would give it a D in terms of functionality. I meant forgot about the CMS when you want to run a separate blog.

Im confused again, are you adding a store onto an existing domain name, or is this a brand new store?

You never pass 100% of link juice if it is from 301's or canonical updates. I dont have a scientific answer but it is probably 65-80% depending upon factors like quality of links and number of links.

[PEnterprises]

The more I read the more I become confused lol. I am now considering going with a hosted solution as well as a licensed solution so I can learn for myself which is better.

For my clients sites they will probably need a solution such as Magento as they can hire a team etc.

I however only operate stores that cary 5 to 50 products. I am thinking going with a hosted solution like big commerce or 3dcart will allow me to get it set up worry free and concentrate on my marketing. They seem to tell me absolutely everything can be customized if I hire someone and let them work on the code. Is this not correct?

Any thoughts?

[JoshGill27]

Agreed. We just spent so much time trying to fix crazy magento problems that the price seems worth it even though your right, our clients spend anywhere to 150-300 dollars a month. I guess it just depends on how you look at it and how much money you are brining in. Good point though.

[RyanKent]

Shopify seems like a nice service but is incredibly expensive for a simple store.

I have two clients with simple stores. They only sell a couple products and generate around 20k sales/month each. Their current shopping cart is "asecurecart" which is only $15/month with no transaction fee.

If they move to Shopify and purchased the minimum $29 plan, the 2% transaction fee would mean $400/month in fees. The plan that works out the cheapest with Shopify is their $179/month plan since it's the only plan without a transaction fee. You are paying over 2k/yr for a shopping cart when ZenCart and other solutions are free.

Perhaps it is sensible for very large stores, or shops with very low sales volumes, but it seems like a very costly way to go otherwise.

[JoshGill27]

We deal with many ecommerce clients on a daily basis and have found that those who want to manage their own and dont' want to worry about hosting and all the stresses of hiring a developer like with Magento enjoy using Shopify. Shopify is reasonably priced, we have had good SEO success with it, and has a ton of apps that extend it's functionality. For someone in your position it is worth looking at. Thanks.

[PEnterprises]

Also, I think that would be a great blog post! There is a real lack of clarification on what peoples options are and what they should be doing based on their situation.

[PEnterprises]

LuxWork,

Thank you as you clarified a LOT for me. I have been considering going with a hosted shopping cart solution for one of my new sites and now it appears that is not a good idea. If you wouldn't mind clarifying a few more things in line with what you said.

1. One thing the hosted solutions lean on is all the added services such as social media integration, amazon/ebay integration etc etc. So if I were to go with a self hosted solution I will have to have a developer create these things for me when he modifies or creates my site?
2. If my stores are generally small 50 products or less and one that is 150 products this still all applies correct?
3. Do you have any suggestions for which shopping cart solution would be best for this situation: I would like something that is fairly user friendly, something that makes seo easy to implement and. Maybe you could give me a list of the top 5 best choices and I can do some research on them.

Thank you

[RyanKent]

Hi Luxwork,

I would like to learn and understand more from your reply.

When you say "forget about the CMS", I can understand if you have a store with thousands of items. There are people who spend tens of thousands of dollars developing their shopping cart. But for small sites who are selling around 100 items, do you still feel this way? If the look and feel of the store is not the same as the site, then the user experience and branding will be lessened.

I would ask the same question about the sub-domain. We are not talking about a Nike shop with thousands of items, but a relatively small shop with around 100 items. By moving the store to it's own domain you are losing all the DA of the main domain. Is your advice still to use a separate domain for small shops?

With respect to the costs of changing shopping carts, I agree the costs would be high but if you truly have full control over your URL structures, there would be zero loss from 301s. The structure I am working on setting up is mysite.com/store/productname. If I am successful, then if I was to change shopping carts, the URL would remain identical. That is one of the advantages of having full SEO control over your shopping cart, right?

Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and I would look forward to your blog article.

[LuxWork]

I used to work at Volusion and have decent experience with other platforms out there and do lots of seo for ecommerce.

A. Forgot about the CMS. Evaluate the ecommerce platform for its ecommerce, not for making blog posts. For content postings and stuff, make it a subdomain, or make the main site the CMS and the ecommerce a subdomain. (shop.stuffonsale.com)

B. For Great seo for ecommerce you need to run your own fully customizable platform. Volusion has very limeted SEO functions. They are decent for basic sites, but if you want to get into awesome customized category, product, plus other hierarchies then definitely dont go with a hosted cart solution. Companies like Shopfiy are great for selling like 50 t shirt SKUS, but have very limited flexibilty in how the site works.

C. Hosting carts main benefit is  you dont have to worry about uptime & tech changes. Hopefully you have someone technical on your team or you have access to a great developer. With ecommerce there is a very HIGH cost of changing platforms at some point in time. You will have hundreds of indexed pages at a given URL structure. If you change then the URL structure with all platforms is different so you would have a big drop in traffic as you start to 301 all the pages.

D. Most platforms now will allow custom design changes at varying levels. Most support custom CSS changes and template changes. Hosted carts will always still be less flexible than a self hosted cart because on self hosted you can truly edit any file that is part of the shopping site. Hosted carts you are limited to what they give you access to.

E. Your last couple questions are kinda vague. You have to have a dynamic ecommerce site, static shopping sites are a headache to manage unless you are talking about just a couple SKUs.

F. I would recommend you find a developer or another person that has created several successful ecommerce sites using different platforms.

Maybe I should write a blog post on how to pick a platform for shopping.

[RyanKent]

Will I always need a CMS with a shopping cart platform?

No, but I would recommend one in most cases. A Content Management System allows you to add content (articles, web pages, etc) to your site as a user or admin. Without a CMS, users cannot add content to your site and admins would have to know HTML in order to create web pages.

Popular CMS solutions run millions of websites each, so you can develop high quality websites faster, with more features and consistency. Without a CMS you are limiting your site's content and also who can add that content.

Which is an example of an external one?

Go to this site: http://www.nationwidebarcode.com/ean-upc-barcodes/

In the right side bar you will see an "Add To Cart" button. Push it. You are instantly taken off the "nationwidebarcode" site and brought to the "e-junkie" site to complete the transaction. Some "shopping cart" solutions only work in this manner.

Accepting payments is a 3 part process:

1. Shopping cart. This is where a user designates what items he or she wishes to purchase. The items are totaled along with any tax and shipping charges.

2. Payment gateway. This is basically the bank authorization. They approve the purchase. These will be secure pages which collect credit card or other banking information.

3. Merchant Account. This is your account which will receive the money.

The above is my understanding of the process. As I shared, this is simply knowledge I have collected and I do not consider myself an expert in this area. If anyone wishes to add their knowledge it would be appreciated.

Does the shopping cart control that or the cms system?

The CMS controls the pages created by the CMS and the shopping cart controls the pages it creates. These are two different systems co-existing on the same site.

Some shopping carts come with built in SEO features. Others do not. Some integrate well with your CMS allowing the CMS to overwrite the default SEO settings.

I really think you would be best served by hiring a developer to build your site. I would recommend checking with friends and other business owners to locate a reliable company. There is a huge range of knowledge, experience and prices. Take your time and locate a developer who will create a site based on your needs.

[PEnterprises]

Ryan, thank you for your detailed and in depth answer. I now have more grasp on what is going on. Could you clarify a few things?

1. Will I always need a CMS with a shopping cart platform? So I will need to pick a CMS to go with whether I go with Zen, Magento, 3dCart, Volusion, BigCommerce, Xcart, etc? I am a little confused because don't some of those already come with CMS? Or am I TOTALLY lost here?
2. You said there are basically 2 types of shopping cart software. One where it stays on your site and the other where it is external? Which is an example of an external one? I do know that 3d cart for example if you dont get your own payment gateway you will be using their system versus your own correct? Is that what you mean?
3. You also said- "the cart should provide SEO control over it's pages. The cart should either provide friendly URLs and control over titles, meta descriptions, etc." I am a little confused here. Are you just talking about friendly urls inside the shopping cart or accross the entire site? Does the shopping cart control that or the cms system?

Thanks Ryan!

[RyanKent]

Hi Jake.

I am definitely not a shopping cart expert but I was recently in a similar situation as you describe. I have a client who's current shopping cart is lacking in numerous areas which is affecting his SEO. He asked for advise on what shopping cart system and CMS he should use.

A first consideration I had was the CMS. There are many software solutions in the marketplace. Popularity is an important factor when choosing a CMS. The more popular software will have a larger number of extensions available and there will be more developers available who are familiar with the software. The most popular CMS solutions in the marketplace are: Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal.

After my research I chose Joomla based on it's flexibility, popularity and extensions. The next step was selecting a shopping cart for the Joomla site. A shopping cart is software and any cart could be made to work with a given site. With that understood, I wanted a cart that already had a bridge established for Joomla. A bridge is an integration allowing for data to be shared back and forth between the CMS and shopping cart software. My primary concern was the desire to only have users log into the site once. We didn't want a solution where users needed to log in once to the site, and again into the shopping cart software.

There are 24 existing Joomla shopping cart extensions. Some of the software is not available for the current version, so I eliminated those options. I feel extensions should "extend" the functionality of the core software. If an extension does not stay current with the software, then it prevents you from keeping your CMS up-to-date. The developers provide updates but you can't install them because your shopping cart or other extensions you are dependent upon would break. I find that unacceptable.

There are other carts that were ruled out because they weren't available in English, had very poor ratings, or other factors. In the end I reviewed about a dozen carts. In each case I reviewed the developer's site and either contacted them by e-mail or forums. In my situation we needed a cart with the following functionality:

• the cart software should be "lite" in terms of server resources required. Magento seems like a great solution but it can handle 10k+ products and is clearly designed for major stores. I read numerous reports that Magento requires a lot of server resources and my client prefers not to upgrade his web server in order to support a new shopping cart.

• the cart should accept both Paypal and Google Checkout. Almost every cart accepts Paypal but there are a lot that do not accept Google Checkout. There are numerous SEO related advantages to using Google Checkout and I feel every site I support should accept that method of payment.

• the cart should be contained within the existing site. My research showed there are basically two types of shopping cart solutions. One solution is where the cart is on your existing website. The other solution is where your customers are taken off your site and onto the shopping cart vendor's site. The preference is to keep customers on your site so you get the maximum benefits from SEO and tracking. There are ways to work with external carts but in my opinion it is preferable to keep your customers on your site.

• the cart should be customer focused. Some carts are transaction focused and do not retain customer data between visits. This forces customers to re-enter their information which is not user friendly.

• the cart should offer full CSS control to the site. You should be able to change all of the look and feel to mirror your site. Some carts only offer minimal CSS changes.

• the cart should provide SEO control over it's pages. The cart should either provide friendly URLs and control over titles, meta descriptions, etc. or it should be easily able to integrate with existing extensions such as sh404SEF.

Those were the requirements I was working with for my client. In the end I chose Zen Cart which is free, open sourced software. I am not sure why you list Zen Cart as paid software. Zen Cart met all of my needs.

How would I know how certain cart platforms are coded?

Check their main website. The carts you referred to are mostly PHP carts. A great resource for more answers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software

Would I also then hire a designer to create a site that works with zen cart or purchase a template made then customize?

It's up to you to decide based on your level of knowledge and time whether you wish to set up the cart yourself or hire a developer. For ZenCart I would recommend their 400 page manual. If you hired a developer, I would definitely seek out a developer who has a lot of experience with the particular cart and CMS.

I hope some of my experiences will be of help in your decision making. Good luck.