So you may be thinking, well I have a website and I sell stuff there so that is great I am all covered when it comes to mobile commerce. The question you should be asking is “Do I have a mobile friendly version of my website that those using a mobile device will see?” There are a number of things to consider when designing a mobile website because the navigation, screen size, and display is very different on a mobile device than on a PC, as is the behavior of the user when accessing the website from a mobile device. Those customers accessing a website from a mobile device will generally spend less time on your site but are more likely to buy something sooner than someone visiting it from a PC. For this reason having your mCommerce site designed with a very simple format and layout, without a lot of extra information, resources, etc is more useful than a feature and content rich website. Understanding what mCommerce is and how it works is critical. Some mCommerce statistics report that as much as 38% of smart phone owners have used their phone to purchase something online and this number is constantly increasing.

Reports vary about the type of products and services that are being purchased through mobile commerce. Some say the largest market is products and applications for the smartphone, including apps, music, etc. while other results show that consumers are buying everything from big electronics like computers to jewlery, clothing, and other appearal. With the new trend in marketing incorporating text message marketing, mCommerce is expected to continue to rise. Companies can send a mobile coupon and a link to their mobile commerce site, where people can make a purchase and redeem the coupon instantly. However you look at it, the question isn’t whether mCommerce will continue or if you need a mobile friendly website, the question is how fast is the industry going to grow and how soon do I need a mobile commerce site?

Many of the best shopping cart providers already include the means for creating a mobile friendly site or at the very least a mobile app that allows customers to shop at their online store from a mobile device. Mobile apps work great for current customers, but keep in mind that many mobile users are still using their mobile devices to search and browse the Internet and you don’t want to miss out on this traffic that you could be getting to your site. That all comes with understanding what mCommerce is and how to use it effectively.

Before selecting the best shopping cart software for your website be sure to inquire about mobile commerce elements they have to offer and they type of design and support they provide for these applications. When you understand what mCommerce is, you understand how important it is to make sure you are utilizing it. Read some shopping cart reviews to learn more about mobile commerce features and options to find the best shopping cart software to meet your needs. Visit BigCommerce or Volusion now to learn more about their mobile commerce options.

Our BigCommerce review found that their service is very affordable, user friendly, and has some of the best shopping cart tools that are needed for a basic online store. They offer a free trial, free setup and free customer support so you have nothing to lose if you want to try it out, see how the system works and then decide if this is the best shopping cart solution for your needs. With BigCommerce you have the option and ability to link your service to Facebook and eBay and to sell items on an iPhone or iPad as well. One great thing about the BigCommerce service is that it is all inclusive, you do not have to be an expert in web hosting, server management, backup systems or anything of the sort, BigCommerce takes care of all of this for you. They understand that your focus needs to be on running your business and making money. The basic plan lets you list 100 products and 2 GB of bandwidth for $24.95. Overall the free templates are better than most and the entire system is clean and easy to use.

Volusion offers the same basic shopping cart features as BigCommerce. They also have a free trial, free templates, although a lot of Volusion reviews say they are not happy with the quality of the free templates, and numerous options for social media integration and mobile commerce. The basic plan starts at $19 per month and allows 100 products with 1 GB of data transfer. There is no setup fee with Volusion and you will have free 24/7 support. Both Volusion and BigCommerce offer multiple packages for you to choose from so that you can find the plan with the features and tools you need. Check out some Volusion vs BigCommerce reviews to learn more about the differences in these two shopping cart providers.

Our third recommendation is Pinnacle Cart. Our Pinnacle Cart review found that the basic shopping cart options are just as good as those from BigCommerce and Volusion and they also offer a free trial. The basic plan is a little bit more expensive, $30 and a $49 setup fee but you do get unlimited products, 100 MB disk space and 1 GB of bandwidth. Each package also comes with a free 2048 bit shared SSL certificate. But the thing we really love about Pinnacle Cart is the options the licensing options they have that will allow you to host their software on your own server. Choose from a full license or the developer license, depending on your needs. Each comes with lifetime use of the Pinnacle Cart software and 1 year of updates and support. The developer license also allows you access to the source code so that you can make your own changes as needed.

If you are looking for the best shopping cart provider for 2012, check out BigCommerce, Volusion, and Pinnacle Cart. These three are certainly among some of the best shopping cart providers in the industry. Finding the best ecommerce solution for your online store is an individual decision. Maybe you already have a store hosted somewhere else and you are just looking for something better, whatever the case may be, these 3 best shopping cart providers each have something great to offer. Check them out and find the best shopping cart to meet your needs.

Shopping Cart for WordPress
There are many different options you can consider using when you are looking for the best shopping cart option for WordPress. You might be looking for something that just adds a few handy shopping cart tools, or you might be looking for something that is more all-inclusive. If you are going for super simple and easy, there are those shopping cart options for WordPress as well. Best of all, most of these shopping cart for WordPress options are free or open source. While there are some you might want to consider upgrading to a paid subscription, there are others that you can simply download and use as a plugin for your WordPress site for free. Let’s take a look at a few of the top shopping cart options you might want to consider using on your WordPress site or blog to run your online store.

The WP e-Commerce Plugin
To start, this is probably one of the best WordPress shopping cart options available. It is a plugin, so it is super easy to install on your WordPress blog or website. The WP e-Commerce plugin is not just a shopping cart but also operates as an entire e-commerce solution that looks awesome, sleek and functional. You can use WP e-Commerce to sell products, handle transactions, manage your store, establish shipping/billing options, etc. If you are looking for a one-stop shop for your online store, this is the perfect option for you and your WordPress website and store.

The Quick Shop Plugin
Next up is the Quick Shop Plugin for WordPress. Like its name implies, the Quick Shop is a super easy tool to use to run your WordPress website. You can have it function on the sidebar of your blog or website and it allows your customers to quickly add and subtract or change quantities of items as they shop. it also allows your customers to see exactly what they have in their shopping cart at any given time during the shopping process so they don’t have to navigate away from their current shopping page. This is a super handy tool to help you manage your online store as well as appeal to the needs of your customers shopping at your website. Use it quickly and easily by installing it as a plugin for your WordPress website.

WordPress PayPal Plugin
As PayPal quickly becomes one of the most popular payment gateways on the web, you can now use the PayPal plugin for your WordPress online store to manage all of your transactions, orders, shipping and billing information. You can use PayPal for its ability to offer you a simple shopping cart solution. All you have to do is plug it in to your WordPress dashboard and you are in business. Because it is PayPal it already comes with awesome security features so your customers will know they can trust in doing business with your website. Having a secure way to handle transactions, that is also easy, is a great way to do business with your online website; Paypal or Google Checkout are both great options.

What makes PrestaShop one of the best open source ecommerce systems? There are a number of things to look for when considering an open source shopping cart software. First, open-source means that the software is free download and users will have access to the code so that they can customize and tweak the software for the exact look and feel needed for each individual ecommerce site. Obviously this means that one will have to have basic technical skills and knowledge about how to install the software and make the necessary adjustments for each e-shop using the PrestaShop software. PrestaShop is a php MySQL customizable solution with hundreds of extensions and templates in addition to the main 265 features included in the basic PrestaShop shopping cart software.

Let’s take a look at some of the PrestaShop basic features included with their ecommerce software:

• Unlimited categories and unlimited customizable products
• Create customer groups, loyalty system, customer referral program
• PDF invoices, special offers, return management, customizable order status
• Unlimited payment options
• Unlimited carriers and shipping destinations, order tracking, shipping estimates
• Online statistics for orders, visitors, conversion rate, and more
• 3 Standard languages – English, French, Spanish with 41 translations available
• Unlimited currencies, taxes, timezone options
• SEO optimized
• Secure back-office, SSL compatible, PCI DSS compliant
• Tons of customizations for both the back end office and front side store

PrestaShop also offers training sessions to provide extra trainginf for the php developer, web developer, or back office features, depending on the area you want more training in. The PrestaShop ecommerce software also includes website templates in a number of categories to help website developers find the exact look he wants for his online store without spending hours creating every element from scratch.  To learn more about the PrestaShop software try out the free demo to get a good feel for how it all works and what is available. PrestaShop offers all the best shopping cart tools and features, compare PrestaShop to Magento or any of the well known shopping cart solutions and you will find that they offer all the same top features, and often even more.

Our PrestaShop review found that PrestaShop truly has something for everyone. It is no wonder more than 100,000 members have found PrestaShop the best open source ecommerce software for his/her ecommerce store. Check out the PrestaShop blog to learn about the latest news, tips, and upcoming events. PrestaShop is well known for their active development team, working to stay on top of the ever changing and developing ecommerce market. At PrestaShop there are a number of ways to get in contact with the support team. Use the form to get a custom quote for special requests, use the forum to talk to other users, or take advantage of the online documentation and user guide for basic information and trouble shooting. The PrestaShop bug tracker will also help users keep track of any known issues that are being worked on. For technical support over the phone they have a toll free number that is available between 9am-12PM and 2-6PM EST.

Visit BestShoppingCartReviews.com to see additional PrestaShop reviews or leave your own PrestaShop review of your personal experience using the PrestaShop shopping cart software.

The Volusion free shopping cart giveaway runs from Oct. 4th-Oct 24th, 2011. That is still almost 2 weeks that users can register. The winners will be chosen through a random drawing and the winners will be announced on the Volusion Facebook page on Thursday October 27th. Each entrant must be a lawful US citizen and be at least 18 years of age. To enter, an individual must “like” the Volusion Facebook page and enter his/her name and a valid email address. The prize must be claimed within 60 days of winning and the online store must stay active (meaning the admin logs in at least once a month) once it is created, to stay free.

Volusion offers numerous shopping cart software options to choose from. So which Volusion store will the winner receive? The Volusion store that will be awarded is the Gold store. The Volusion Gold store, which usually sales for $99 per month, allows up to 5,000 products to be listed, accommodates up to 15 GB of monthly data transfer and provides 24 hour customer support every day of the year. The prize packages does not include having a store designed for you, but the Gold plan does include free templates to help a user easily setup and customize his/her store design. Other key benefits that a user will enjoy with the Volusion Gold store include an Onboard Coach, a personal point of contact that will help business owners in the early stages of creating his online store. A customizable Social Store is another huge benefit included in the Volusion Gold plan, it allows businesses to list products on the his/her company Facebook page where customers can see and make purchases instantly.

From our Volusion review we have found that the Volusion free store for life is a tremendous deal for anyone that is serious about running an online store. At the normal rate of $99 per month, store owners will be saving nearly $1,200 a year! Even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place winners will save between $99 and $594. If you enter the contest but don’t win, be sure to check out the Volusion site to see if they are the best shopping cart software for your needs. Volusion  offers plans starting as low as $19 per month for stores listing up to 100 products. In business since 1999, Volusion has served more than 100,000 entrepreneurs worldwide. Use our link below to visit the Volusion website and see why thousands of businesses are using Volusion shopping cart software to start an online business store.

Volusion Shopping Carts

The term php shopping cart comes from the programming language in which the software is written. A php shopping cart is designed to work with websites that support php. There are many open source applications that are created using php. This is especially useful for someone that is familiar with php and wants to be able to make customizations and tweaks to his/her shopping cart software. Using a pre-made php shopping cart software saves a lot of time from building the entire cart from scratch. There are many free php scrips available online as well. These free scrips can be used to help in customizing an open source php shopping cart system.

There are many php shopping carts that are available as open source or GNU (available under a General Public License). Many of the best web hosting companies will offer these shopping cart software scripts as part of their web hosting features and will have some knowledge and experience about how to install and integrate the software into your website. We will take a quick look at some of the most popular and more well established php shopping carts but if none of these suit your needs, there are many other options available.

Popular php Shopping Cart Software

osCommerce is a very well known php shopping cart software. First released in 2000 the osCommerce software can be used on any web server that has php and MySQL installed. The latest version, 3.0, was released in March 2011 and has many differences from the previous version with a more object based backend and a template system that makes layout changes much easier. osCommerce, like other open source software, has an active community forum where people discuss issues, ideas, addons, tips and tricks, and installation and configuration as well. If your web host is not able to provide the help and support you need for your osCommerce shopping cart you may find help here.

ZenCart is a break off from osCommerce. ZenCart was first created in 2003. The biggest difference in the ZenCart shopping cart is the architecture of the system. The most recent update moved the template system from a table based layout to a CSS approach. The ZenCart shopping cart includes all the features needed to run an online store from products and pricing to order management and newsletter features, everything is included. Only minimal skills are required for basic installation and use. Customization is possible but may require more technical skills. There are many custom programming services available that are familiar with ZenCart and are able to help with customization, for a price.

OpenCart is another simple php shopping cart that is rich in features, easy to install and use and has lifetime free support and updates added in to make it an even better choice. This shopping cart software is an “out of the box” solution making the shopping cart easy to integrate and use on your website. Reading some OpenCart reviews can give you an understanding of how current users like the software as well as some of the strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other shopping cart software systems. Shopping cart reviews from actual users will give the best information about possible problems you may encounter.

For more shopping cart reviews and other shopping cart software options visit bestshoppingcartreviews.com Our site also includes additional aritcles and tutorials about shopping cart options, optimization, payment processing and much more. Find out all you need to know about shopping cart software today.

Both Volusion and Magento are feature packed shopping carts. Both offer great product management tools, easy administrative tools, and excellent marketing features to help potential customers find your website. Aside from setting up your estore and marketing the website, there are a number of other things to consider when selecting shopping cart software. Some things to pay attention to include shipping options, payment processing options, and customer service tools. Depending on the number of products your estore will be listing, you may want to take into consideration how many products can be listed, how many photos can be upload, how many options can be shown, and product comparison features.

In our Volusion vs Magento comparison one thing we did notice was that Volusion has more information about security protections for their shopping cart software. Volusion clearly states that their service is PCI/CISP certified, this means that their service meets or exceeds all ecommerce security requirements to protect your website and your customers sensitive data to make sure that it is secure. Additionally the Volusion system allows for multiple administrator logins so that a business owner can allow multiple users access to the site, but limit the information that is accessible to each user.

Other features that Volusion offers include, premium hosting with 100% redundancy on all hardware, systems, applications, and data. They use only the best technology to ensure that you have reliable service and that your website is available and functioning virtually all the time. Volusion offers a design suite and world-class support, so if you are worried about how hard it will be to create the site to meet your business ideas or if you just want to know that help is available if you need it, Volusion offers all the help and features to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

Magento features are very robust as well and they offer two separate plans to target the needs of either the small business owner or the enterprise size business. The hosted shopping cart from Magento will provide everything one needs to create the complete webstore, even the web hosting. The Magento Go plan is a turnkey solution that has everything ready to go. Choose a design template and upload your company logo then drag and drop the site elements around until you have the look you want. Take advantage of the unlimited customization options to advertise your specific products in the way that works best for your website design and business strategy.

Overall, both Magento and Volusion have a very robust platform that is loaded with features. Volusion has been around longer, starting out in 1999 where Magento is much newer to the shopping cart industry, with their open source version being released in 2008. The open source community version is the only version that is free but it can be used with any web hosting provider if the user has the knowledge and skills required to set it up and keep it running. Magento launched Magento Mobile just last year and ebay announced in February that they made an investment in Magento in 2010 giving them 49% ownership.

Finding the best shopping cart software will really depend on the needs of your business. Each has its strong points and both Volusion and Magento have the features needed to run an online store. Take a few minutes to read some Volusion reviews and Magento reviews to learn more about the user experience of both. Talk to reps from both companies to get a feel for the customer service and support options and then decide which is the best shopping cart to meet your needs. Use our links below to visit both Volusion and Magento, today.

Magento Shopping Cart

Volusion

Where Do You Find Free Shopping Carts

Free shopping carts may be avaialble through a provider like SimpleScripts when you sign up for shared Linux hosting or by adding a theme or module to a content management software program like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla! or as a direct download from a developer. As with every other free offering, free shopping carts can have pros and cons.  Let’s take the pros first.

Pros of Free Shopping Carts

Here are some of the pros of free shopping carts.  Some of the pros apply to all free shopping carts, and some apply more selectively.

• Well, first of all, they’re free! That’s a big plus in their favor.
• You can find stand-alone choices or shopping carts that can be integrated with other website elements, like a blog or other free-standing pages that are not part of the ecommerce part of the site.
• There are pre-fab shopping carts that are useful for novices in the online world because they have almost everything you need already set up.
• There are also shopping carts that those with coding skills can adapt and elaborate.
• Some of them have simple transaction options like PayPal or Google CheckOut integration, while others are compatible with a merchant account, payment gateway, and SSL certificate use.

Cons of Free Shopping Carts

Here are some of the cons of free shopping carts. In this case, none of the cons are universal: they apply only to particular shopping carts.

• Development may cease.  Somebody providing a free product has to have a reasonable incentive to keep on providing it. If the incentive ceases, you may be stuck with a product that has reached an end.
• Support may be limited.  You may be limited to a support forum, which may not be the level of support that you need for your ecommerce site.
• Limitations in documentation. Or you may have to pay for it.
• Limitations in functionality. If the developer is putting out the free shopping cart as a lure to encourage you to purchase a paid product, you may find that some functionality is reserve for the folks who pay.
• Forced advertising. If the developer is making the time to create this free version because of the advertising benefits, then the “price” of the free software may be putting up with advertising on your site. You may be able to eliminate advertising—by paying.
• Free up to a point. Free someimes is used to describe aspects of a product that is not itself free.  For example, EasyStoreCreator offers “free” website templates, but the software costs $67/month, far more than most other shopping cart options.
• No warranty.  Particularly if you can alter the code, these free shopping carts may not provide you with any back-up once you make changes.

Almost all shopping cart software is customizable to an extent, meaning webmasters can change colors, add their own logos, upload product images, descriptions, options, etc. These customizations are typically fairly easy to make and can often be made through a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that is simple, drag and drop. More difficult and time consuming customizations like integrating current inventory or accounting systems with a custom shopping cart, are much more complex. There are many advantages to custom shopping cart software, optimizing the shopping cart for search engine optimization is just one of many, but probably one of the most important. While the look of a cart is important, the most important thing is that customers can find your site and what you have to offer. Next is presenting your service or product in a way that makes your customers want to buy it, then a smooth checkout process that ensures the customer that their purchase is safe and their personal, sensitive information is secure.

When purchasing a turn-key shopping cart solution it should be very easy to set up shop and start making sales. These shopping cart solutions generally include the web hosting, payment gateway, and SSL encryption. For the webmaster that is building a custom shopping cart, these are additional services that will have to be purchased before the business owner can start making sales. It may be more difficult and take additional time and effort to find solutions that are compatible with the software that a programmer builds on his own (especially if he had someone else build it for him and he is not familiar with the scripting language and capabilities of the program). Another option is having the company  you purchase the shopping cart from, customize the shopping cart for you. The consideration here is to make sure that you know specifics of, and have access to, the other elements needed to make it run (payment processors, management systems, editing and updates, etc.)

Most of the best web hosting service providers offer free shopping cart software that can be installed on any web hosting account. Some web hosts may offer support that will help with basic customization but others will not support these open-source, third-party solutions at all. In such cases, a webmaster may have to hire outside help, or use an in-house programmer to customize the software to meet his or her business needs. As you can see there are many variations when it comes to a custom shopping cart. Depending on the level of technical expertise a webmaster has, or has available, will be a major deciding factor in which type of custom shopping cart he or she will use. The most important thing is to do some research before making any decision. Know what you are getting into before you sign up. The more you understand before hand the more likely you are to be happy with the end results.  

For customizable hosted shopping cart solutions we recommend:

BigCommerce

Volusion

The last two areas we will look at in this 3dcart review include customization and customer support. 3dcart offers tons of customization features for their shopping carts from using images, HTML/CSS, javascript, and flash to professional templates that allows webmasters to get the exact look and feel that applies to their business. For search engine optimization the ability to customize the title and meta tags for every page is essential. At 3dcart they make this simple. But the kicker to the whole thing is customer support. 3dcart provides in-house, non-outsourced real live customer support.  Average hold time for phone support is only 5 minutes. Ticket response time is less than 30 minutes. 3dcart also offers live chat support, video tutorials, forums, and an online knowledgebase. Just because it is available doesn’t mean it is great, but the overall satisfaction survey conducted about their customer service shows that the majority of users are either satisfied or very satisfied.

In this 3dcart vs BigCommerce review we will take a look at how each of these shopping cart solutions compare in these areas to give business owners a quick look at whether 3dcart or BigCommerce is the best shopping cart solution to meet their business needs. First we do a complete 3dcart review and then follow up with a BigCommerce review to see how the two compare. At 3dcart they are aware of what it takes to create a successful online store and they strive to provide all the tools one will need to sell any type of product. 3dcart allows a business website to sell all types of products from ebooks, mp3 files, and videos, to physical products that will be shipped to the customer.

Next, let’s review 3dcart’s shipping and payment options. 3dcart offers multiple shipping options to meet the needs of any ecommerce website. From drop shipping, and real time tracking and shipping rates to the many additional features like a shipping label printer and the ability to ship to multiple addresses for one order, the options are limitless. Our 3dcart review found an entire page of detailed features listing all the shipping options available. So what about accepting payments for your goods or services? With 3dcart you will have all the most commonly used options like Google Checkout, PayPal Express, or Amazon Payment Services, in addition 3dcart supports dozens of US payment gateways like Authorize.net and ProPay. In addition you will find Canada payment gateways, UK payment gateways, International payment gateways, like WorldPay, for other countries and other alternative payment method options like echecks. As you can see 3dcart has something that will be useful to any type of business anywhere.

How does BigCommerce compare to 3dcart? Let’s take a look. BigCommerce also supports the selling of both physical and downloadable products to support as many business types as possible. BigCommerce supports more than 50 payment methods, also including Google checkout and PayPal. BigCommerce has 15 shipping options that are supported including real time shipping quotes for USPS, UPS, FedEx and various other shipping entities. When it comes to customization and search engine optimization BigCommerce has a lot of options. The point and click WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor makes it easy to drag and drop and edit individual fields until your store looks and functions exactly the way you want it to.

The BigCommerce shopping cart software is search engine optimized by experts and certified by Aaron Wall, an SEO expert, ensuring that each online store is optimized for the best search engine placement. In addition to just allowing users to customize their title and meta tags, BigCommerce provides many additional tools and tutorials that an help every webmaster figure out the basic things that need to be done to optimize a website for search engines. From videos, webinars, and podcasts to blog posts BigCommerce provides a lot of useful information in regards to search engine optimization. When comparing BigCommerce to 3dcart in regards to customer support, BigCommerce provides live phone support from 7am to 9pm Monday thru Friday and from 9 am to 2 pm central time on Saturdays. In addition they offer numerous online support options like video tutorials, marketing videos, an online knowledgebase, and user and design guides and more. A BigCommerce survey regarding satisfaction with customer support shows that customer support satisfaction has gone from 58% to 87% over the past few months.

Comparing 3dcart and BigCommerce it seems that the two are pretty similar. BigCommerce seems to be geared a little more towards the beginner but 3dcart seems to have a little better rating when it comes to customer support. Both BigCommerce and 3dcart offer hosted solutions, meaning the website hosting is included, and both have a free trial offer that will allow customers to check out all the ins and outs of the software to see if it is a good fit. Use our links below to visit the official site of both 3dcart and BigCommerce to see which is the best shopping cart provider for your business website.

3dcart Official Site

BigCommerce