What are some of the higher end hosted carts?

[AffiliateDreamer]

There are allot of smaller $20-150/month hosted shopping carts out there.

I'm curious what the higher end solutions are, and what sort of advantages do they have over these small business type platforms? (hosted solutions only).

I imagine they offer multi-channel type features, and integration points?

[Kendo]

Purpose designed carts will always be better. For $20-150 you can purchase almost any commercial cart system outright, host it anywhere economically and then customise it to suit your product/market.

[AffiliateDreamer]

$20? Sounds like a script kiddies shopping cart system :)

[Kendo]

Well that could be $20 more than the free ones, so how would you rate the free shopping carts?

[lorax]

All of the higher end carts I know of are custom built carts. You can spend a few hundred bucks on carts like X-Cart or a few thousand on others but if you're really looking for top-end performance then custom is your best bet.

[pbradish]

There's some out there like Demandware and their competitors. They start at $60k/year with a one-time $xxx,xxx install fee. Big corporates use them like Adidas, Crocs, Land's End, Pacsun, etc.

Others like Nike are on Magento Enterprise Premium. They will run you $50k+/yr.

[mcotten]

The industry leaders in hosted shopping carts would be Yahoo! Store, Volusion, BigCommerce and Shopify. Those are in order of market share rather than top rated. Any of these will work for most businesses unless you are at the enterprise level.

All of these platforms have lots of features and thousands of users. The best choice really depends on the different aspects of your business and products.

My preference is BigCommerce as it has a great admin, features and level of customization. With the exception of Yahoo! Stores all have a free trial so you can try them out and determine which you like best.