Looking to change shopping cart - any advice?

[mrsmcy]

Hi, We currently use Roman Cart for our shopping cart and I design our website in Dreamweaver. I am self taught and feel our site is starting to get a bit big for me to keep up with and is looking a bit dated.

We sell personalised products so need a cart that can cope with lots of variations to products.

Ideally we are now looking for:

- 1 page checkout
- Clear checkout page (shows image and clearly lists the variations a customer has selected like Font, Text Colour etc)
- Checkout page that doesn't mean a customer leaves our site (like romancart)
- Add to basket - stay on our site to continue shopping
- Form validation - they have to select text colour before adding to basket
- Must be compatible with Paypal Pro

We would also like these features but they are not essential:
- Recently viewed items
- Daily/weekly offers
- Cross sell - other customers brought...
- Product reviews
- Wish list - to be able to share via e mail link with friend
- Take phone orders and add to admin area
- Brilliant to be able to edit orders before printing with 'office comments' so if someone has e mailed about an order it can be added to it prior to printing so the print room know the other details.
- Mobile phone site

I feel like i am going round in circles with the diffferent sites!
I was looking at Volusion but have seen some poor reviews about sites being down and slow.

Should I stick with a html site and add basket buttons or change to a fully hosted site?

Thanks for any advice

 

[Josh_Farmer]

Hi, We currently use Roman Cart for our shopping cart and I design our website in Dreamweaver. I am self taught and feel our site is starting to get a bit big for me to keep up with and is looking a bit dated.

We sell personalised products so need a cart that can cope with lots of variations to products.

Ideally we are now looking for:

- 1 page checkout
- Clear checkout page (shows image and clearly lists the variations a customer has selected like Font, Text Colour etc)
- Checkout page that doesn't mean a customer leaves our site (like romancart)
- Add to basket - stay on our site to continue shopping
- Form validation - they have to select text colour before adding to basket
- Must be compatible with Paypal Pro

We would also like these features but they are not essential:
- Recently viewed items
- Daily/weekly offers
- Cross sell - other customers brought...
- Product reviews
- Wish list - to be able to share via e mail link with friend
- Take phone orders and add to admin area
- Brilliant to be able to edit orders before printing with 'office comments' so if someone has e mailed about an order it can be added to it prior to printing so the print room know the other details.
- Mobile phone site

I feel like i am going round in circles with the diffferent sites!
I was looking at Volusion but have seen some poor reviews about sites being down and slow.

Should I stick with a html site and add basket buttons or change to a fully hosted site?

Thanks for any advice

Depends on your budget?

There are plenty designers and programmers on here who could do it, but its all about how much you want to spend?

 

[TitanWebsites]

I am guessing you run a business doing personalised products??

Does the shop need to be able to support that?

Anyway, I am in the business of ecommerce websites, so this may be a little bias.

As the previous post said, budget is going to be a key factor, and also how much you want to get your hands dirty, it is not clear what your skill level is.

Personally I would want something I have full control over, and is not limited by some sort of hosting system.

I would probably opt for either Prestashop or Opencart, running on my own hosting or on that of the developer I went with. They should be able to do everything you are looking for.

They are both open source, and have large community support behind them.

The advantage of it being hosted; if the host becomes a problem, just move the whole shop to another, keep your domain registration with someone else, and do regular backups.

The advantage of using a developer should be (assuming you get a good developer of course) good design and function in one tidy cost effective package.

Good luck in your decision.

 

[Websitehandyman]

I have some licences for creloaded I'm not using, take a look at it. I used it but am moving over to cs-cart soon but I've used it without problems to sell memorabilia for over five years. It's easy to use from a shopkeeper's point of view and when I upgrade I'll also have a licence for the desktop manager spare.

 

[coficigarilos]

Hi,
We've emailed you something that may be of help.

cheers & merry Christmas

 

[mrsmcy]

Thanks for your replies. Yes we do run a company offering personalised goods. I would say my knowledge is intermediate. I know there is a lot I don't know and I'm aware of scripting no no's on our site. For example I've been using the old way of using tables to design the site. I've started to learn CSS but find it quite hard to get my head around.
I think the hosted template sites seem appealing at the moment as I'm struggling with the design side. I'm looking at Big Commerce at the moment. But and it's a big but...I'm concerned about using a fully hosted company by not having full control over my site. We also have really good google position for personalised dressing gowns which are our biggest seller.
Worried if we change sites we could have months with no sales whilst we work our way up google rankings. We employ 3 people so couldn't afford wages without sales.
Our website is pure-treats.com if that helps see our requirements.

With regards to budget it depends what we need to spend! We couldn't find loads like £10k plus but we are aware it's our shop so are willing to consider all prices. However we are really busy at the moment even with our current site so I'm not sure if we could justify much more than £500-£1000.

 

[Josh_Farmer]

i've sent you a PM

 

[TitanWebsites]

Worried if we change sites we could have months with no sales whilst we work our way up google rankings. We employ 3 people so couldn't afford wages without sales.

Aha, that's something new.

Now you will need to be a little careful here, and you may want to involve a SEO specialist here, to make sure you lose none of your ranking (hopefully employing a specialist you could improve).

Depending on what hosted solution you move to, you mare loose out, so watch out for this.

I would say some investment in proper SEO would do your site the world of good.

With regards to budget it depends what we need to spend! We couldn't find loads like £10k plus but we are aware it's our shop so are willing to consider all prices. However we are really busy at the moment even with our current site so I'm not sure if we could justify much more than £500-£1000.

I would have said, if your site is fairly "off the shelf", you could involve a developer at around the £1,000 mark, using something like OpenCart or Prestashop, which you could host yourself, and have full control of. A good developer should also be able to sort the SEO aspect for you too.

If you would like any more details please do contact us.

I would suggest that you do not give any more of your business running/success details out publicly (pm me if you want to know why).

As a final bit of advice, before you do anything, I would suggest getting google analytics on your site (on all pages), the few pages I checked don't appear to have it. I think you would benefit from having a month or two of data, to help you with moving forward before making any changes.

Good luck, and Happy New Year.

 

[2012]

I would go with magento, I was on opencart 1.5 but needed something slightly more flexible with good seo so I went of magento

 

[tech365]

The system that we use is called FifteenShop, www.fifteenshop.co.uk and does all of the functionality that you talk about in your post.

Cost wise, we paid just under £5,000 for it plus the VAT but this was recouped by the first months sales through the site.

The company that runs it is in the same building as us and they are an extremely knowledgable bunch and I know other companies that use the same system as us and generate millions of turnover through it!

SEO wise we are top or first page for quite a few keywords.

 

[murrayprice]

I develop ecommerce websites in Open Cart for a range of different clients. I decided to use Open Cart as my tool of choice because after looking at the other solutions, Magento, os-commerce, zen, presta etc etc I found Opencart to be best because:

Flexibilty, there is very little you can't achieve with Open Cart and it has a very active developer community who have produced a massive range of addons/

Price (FREE), running costs (doesn't need dedicated hosting like Magento).

Has an amazing forum where you can get the answers to pretty much any question or problem.

It is easy to setup payment gateways which come as pre-installed modules. It supports 28 payment gateways to date!

Easy to template, for around £60 you can buy a professionally designed template from Algozone or Theme Forest which will make your site look amazing and give your store a really professional look.

SEO is a breeze, the Open Cart developers have really got this worked out well.

Easy to use, I haven't found a store admin which beats Open Cart both in its ease of use and layout.

In terms of cost, you should be looking at the following...

Hosting, depending on the site traffic and the amount of product, you could probably get away with shared hosting for around £10 per month.

Installation, you could do this yourself. If you went with hosting company called Heart Internet (I find them excellent) they offer a one click install, so this make it simple. They offer both shared and virtual private servers if you site needs a bit more oomph.

Template, You can checkout Algozone or Theme Forest, they offer excellent Open Cart templates for around £60 and with a bit of help these can be easily customized. If you find a template that is spot on and you just need to change the logo then you could do this yourself. If you need developer to produce something a bit more bespoke then you can easily find someone on the community forum or PM me

You can checkout the full feature list and see demo at the Open Cart website.

Hope this helps!