I’ve been looking into shopping cart software off an on for about 6 months as I really want to branch away from blogging sites and into sites that take a little less upkeep. I figure if I one site with one income is good, two sites with 3/4 income is better and so on. Of course to do that, they sites have to become somewhat of a automated income stream. A shopping cart doesn’t necessarily fit that bill, but it would fit nicely with an expanded effort in my eBay ventures. Why pay $15.99 a month for an eBay store when I can set up my own for a fraction of the money and drive traffic too it. All the while, not paying eBay their disgusting fees. Sounds like a winner to me.
I had pretty much decided on using osCommerce as my shopping cart until I saw a few screenshots and a list of the features in StoreSuite. I think I’ll be giving it a try when it is released. It has a nice set of features that includes integration with nearly all of the more popular payments. I didn’t see the new Amazon payment listed there, but I sure would like to see it. It also integrates with most of the popular shipping systems. That’s nice. Automatic, integrated shipping quotes makes a site feel that much more professional. The inventory system sounds top notch as well. It purportedly can have set limits and when the inventory reaches that point, it is automatically pulled from the site. If you’ve ever oversold a product, you know how nice that feature is.
And of course, the website guy in me loves the fact that it’s template driven and has a lot of AJAX use going on. Drag and Drop design. Sweet.
At the moment, you can only sign up for as a beta tester, but maybe it’s worth while to try and get in on the testing. Could give you a head start on the consulting for the software as it’s bound to become a popular software. The expected release is somewhere around the 4th quarter of 2007, so it should be knocking on peoples doors pretty soon.
Technorati Tags: storesuite, shopping cart, oscommerce, shipping, ajax
About Shane Ede
Having looked at some of the new solutions around and suffered the bugs and inadequacies, I’d rather stick with osCommerce.
I think a lot of people feel the way Kym does right now, but in the fullness of time, it’s hard to see how OSCommerce can continue to be a player with new, well funded projects like Magento and Shopwrite coming out.