Hello Chris,

I’m a software programmer and I have developed many custom e-commerce sites. One of my favorite open carts is call Zen cart. It can easily handle the work load, however you will need to know a little programming to take advantage of all of it’s features. Either way you can develop a pretty nice e-site with it. Is this an upgrade from a currently existing site? why PHP, you should look into .NET sites. PHP tend to glitch a lot.

Chris,

I’ve been using Volusion for my eCommerce site for the past three years. They have several free templates to choose from, all of which can be viewed on their website at http://www.volusion.com. Their packages and pricing may be found at http://www.volusion.com/ecommerce-web-hosting.asp.

Volusion offers a free 14-day trial if you’d like to take a look at it.

Susan, thank you for the recommendation. It looks like there are many useful features. I have to host it on their servers, which is a drawback for me. I also would really like to see a demo of the store administration which they don’t appear to have.

Raymond, This is a new site. I have Zen Cart and Open Cart on my server to try them out. Isn’t Zen Cart developed solely in PHP? Really, I prefer PHP because that is what I know. I do a heck of a lot better administering a MySql database verses a Sql or Access database. I know that I can run .net and sql on Linux, but I really don’t trust myself to go down that road. Knowing me, I would melt a server :)

I really appreciate the time from both of you. What I am working on now is a the front end of the store and will use Mals cart to do the back end processing. http://mals-e.com/ I have used this a dozen times or so in the past and because of time constraints, I ’ll use it again for now, but hopefully do something more robust during the first of the year. I just have to go live with this project soon.

Thanks again and best wishes.

Chris,

It’s funny you mentioned mals-e.com. I used their free cart service years ago when I was first getting started. It worked just fine for me back then.

One problem with Mals-e that may cost you sales is the fact that your shopping cart is located on a different website. (I haven’t used this service for more than three years and don’t know if this has changed). Back in the day, if a customer was on your website and added an item to their shopping cart, they would be transferred to a different url address. As online shoppers become more and more savvy about online security, this may turn some people away.

Paypal offers a variety of features that you can integrate into your shopping cart. Because so many people are familiar with the Paypal name, it may be a better choice than Mals-e. You can also be sure that Paypal’s security safegards are up to snuff.

Volusion offers a free trial period that will allow you to play around with their design tools and demo the administrative features.

Is there a particular reason why you want to host your site on your own servers? I’ve found it so much easier to deal with one company that handles all the hosting, design tools, and administrative features.

We have our own proprietary cart system that we use as a jump-start but we’ve also started using www.shopify.com. It’s a fully-hosted solution and I understand your desire to host it on your servers but it’s really starting to win me over. It gives you a whole lot of control and costs very little – although they do charge a transaction fee at all but the highest pricing plan. We’ve built four sites on it in the past month and have been very happy so far.