Rodney - 4:50 pm on Sep 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

I think one of the issues I see with webmasters using "off the shelf" shopping cart solutions is they don't take the time to make the end result more usable.

Most of the open source shopping carts out there are lacking in usability "out of the box", but that doesn't mean they need to stay that way.

I see the "demo" as the basic framework of the shopping cart, not what it should look like to the end user. It just saves me the programming time to put all the *functionality* of a shopping cart together.

A designer and someone who has some knowledge of usability *should* be involved with how the final ecommerce site looks to customers. To me that's essential.

From my experience in reading comments on webmaster forums for small business owners who are looking at shopping carts, I think many people don't realize that most of the "off the shelf" shopping cart solutions that are out there can look like ANYTHING you want them to look like if you take the time to customize the theme/skin/templates (as you should).

Most don't want to take the time and would rather be up and running as soon as possible.

To me the shopping cart is just the the wood, hammer and nails that make up the house framework. It's up to an architect (designer) to make the actual house pretty. worst analogy evar