E Commerce

[overseerhobbit2]

Hi am going to be setting up a small online store. Probably only 15 to 20 products bluegrass records and videos primarily. As this is a niche market sales will be small as well. My question is what payment gateway and shopping cart solution would you reccomend.

[Connie]

I use Authorize.net for a gateway. Can't really advise you on the Cart. I use a very old Perl cart that is no longer available. Most of the carts today are not SE friendly out of the box.

I understand that OS Commerce is a good cart. It's free. You would possibly need to pay for some customization. Depends on how much of a programmer you are.

[gerilya]

I think the first question is how you expect to attract customers.
SEO? Targeted marketing in relevant communities? Some visitors may know exactly what they want while others just curious. Also, what's your competitive advantage?

When you know the answers to these questions, you should have a better understanding of your site requirements. They may or may not include any of the following:
- unique look&feel for your site (that's not always possible due to limitations of some carts)
- marketing tools (coupons, gift certificates, conditional discounts etc)
- analysis tools (tracking and reports)
- shipping options (there are too many to list them here, but consider for example Amazon's Super Saver Shipping option).
- checkout options (confusing checkout process will cost you clients)
- incentives for returning customers - (for example, a special area where clients can check orders status, download invoices. Also special prices/coupons for old clients)
- affiliates management

There is of course much more, this is just to help you get started

[tank]

depends on what you have to put in upfront. if you are looking for a free cart i would go with Zen Cart. OScommerce used to be the one but they haven't updated it in quite sometime. and if you use a popular payment gateway then ther eis probably soemthing written for it. In a recent project I bought x-cart which is top notch and comes ready to roll with plenty of gateways built in. if you have the money I would go with that one.

[overseerhobbit]

Basically what we will be selling are a few products ie cds and videos most are proprierty products we have created with a few major label bluegrass cds thrown in for some added revenue.

I like the authorize net gateway except for the monthly minimum charge. Because of that I am leaning towards 2checkout.com. Zen Cart looks to me like an updated oscommerce from what I can remember with my last experience with oscommerce. The only problem oscommerce seemed to have were a lot of minor bugs which I had to go and and make workarounds for.

Thanks for the wonderful comments and if you have more suggestions feel free to send em in.

[the_ancient]

Basically what we will be selling are a few products ie cds and videos most are proprierty products we have created with a few major label bluegrass cds thrown in for some added revenue.

I like the authorize net gateway except for the monthly minimum charge. Because of that I am leaning towards 2checkout.com. Zen Cart looks to me like an updated oscommerce from what I can remember with my last experience with oscommerce. The only problem oscommerce seemed to have were a lot of minor bugs which I had to go and and make workarounds for.

Thanks for the wonderful comments and if you have more suggestions feel free to send em in.

there are other gateways besides authorize.net, and authorize.net is just a gateway you still have to get a Merchant account with another person, like jags recommended service edataonline.

I would look at a Service provider that does both, like CDGcommerce, if you go with a 3rd party process I would choose paypal over 2checkout, 2 checkout only make dep's 2 times a month which sucks if you selling tangible products, and there fees are higher than any other.


Zen Cart is a Fork of OSC, created by an old OSC team member and some Freq Contributors of OSC who did not like how the Main OSC project was being managed.

Zen Cart today is a whole differant beast than OSC, same core but Zen, IMO is a whole lot better.