Unfortunately, when it comes to selling online, the terminology is all over the place. Generally speaking, the term Ecommerce just means anything related to selling online. More specifically, the tools needed to do this are known by a variety of names, yet they are pretty much the same for the most part. Here are a few:
With that out of the way, let us get down to business. finding a good, cheap shopping cart software is much, much more difficult than finding cheap hosting; and that is because your business will likely have many business requirements that may be very unique to your busienss. Let me re-iterate: features are what tend to separate one cart from another. And the bigger your online store will be, the more demanding the requirements tend to get.
Features can range from everything from being search engine optimized, to the way products are displayed on the site. A lot of people just think about features on the online store, hwoever, equally important are all the pieces that you do not see such as: order processing and fulfillment tools, customer manager, product and category manager, reporting tools, marketing tools, etc... Consider such factors as:
Bugs: how often the cart doesnt work (bugs)
Support: If they do not answer your questions, or help fix problems, you might not be able to sell anything.
Conversion rate optimized: how well is the cart designed to convert shoppers into buyers. Lots of features, but poor conversion means no sales for you.
Customization / Integration: what ways you might be able to tie into the cart with custom software if needed.
Marketing Tools: A single good marketing tool, like the ability to push your products out to shopping search engines like Google Products and Yahoo Shopping can easily double the sales of some businesses.
Ease of Use: The easier it is to use, the more productive you will be, which becomes even more important as your store grows. For example, simply having the ability to print shipping labels from the backend could save you hours of work vs. manually copying and pasting into a shippers website (e.g. UPS, USPS, FedEx).
Reporting: Sometimes you can live without a ton of reporting for smaller stores, or if you use Google Analytics, but it is something to think about.
Rather than go into depth, which would take a good 300 page book to cover the basics, we have simply compiled a list of the best carts for the money, divided up into classes.
You can sort of divide shopping cart into two different groups:
Full Featured Store: These are typically geared towards sites whose primary purpose is selling products, usually more than just one or two. For example, such a cart would allow you to login and create a product (create name, description, upload image, set prices, etc...) which would then appear on your website. and then when you hit the Save button, they appear on your website. These type of shopping carts are what you might think of when you think of a typical shopping cart. Often they have all sorts of great business functionality built in; everything from powerful shopping navigation, to all sorts of merchandizing such as cross-selling features, to wishlists, to sophisticated order management.
BUY NOW buttons: A few carts out there do not help you create product pages much, nor integrate the store with the rest of your site. Quite often, these are used on websites where the primary purpose is NOT to sell products, but maybe has a few products on the side. Basically, under this scenario, you need to build your own store and product pages using a program like Dreamweaver, and then attach a Buy Now button using some special code thats provided to you by the shopping cart program. These are geared towards those who only have one or few products (usually that do not change very often) and just need a way for people to buy them. Often the costs are minimal, or virtually free. You also usually need to be comfortable building your own web pages, or hire someone to do it.
