Need Suggestions for E-com Site Setup

Based on several criteria

[stuntdubl]

I'm sure that this question has been asked in here before, but I figured I would come to the experts for this advice.

I haven't set up many e-com offerings, and haven't really had a great opportunity to do so until recently. I have not seen a package that has completely "wow"'d me yet, and I was hoping for a little direction. I would like to find a package to learn well to use on a majority of my sites in the future. Anyhow...here is the criteria I am using for my decision. Please give your recommendations and how they rate 1-10 scale on the following:

Ease of Use
Is it easy to setup? Can the customer update it?

Search Engine Friendliness
Can you tweak all the necessary variables to perform good SEO? Is there big long nasty URL's? Will the pages get spidered properly?

Ease of Customization
Can you design your own site in DW and use whatever style you would like?

Scalability
Can I add 1000 products? 10,000? Will speed or performance suffer? Can I start out with 10?

Additional Features
Is there good customer tracking and statistics offered support? How is the provider's customer service?

Price
I believe you should never base a decision solely on price, but it is always an issue with clients. Considering I am fairly new to this, I would like to have a somewhat low barrier to entry.

I have been just using paypal for smaller sites as to not run up the expenses for sites that are just selling small things.

I have also used Yahoo Store, but am put off by the rigidity of the templates in regards to making them SE-friendly.

I have heard virtua-cart is good, but have yet to use it.

Any reviews/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance;)

[lazerzubb]

I would advise reading:
[webmasterworld.com...]

And this is by far the best you can read if your knew to e-commerce:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Have all your answers :)

[mossimo]

I am curently developing a site using Product Cart
It's the most clean and profetional I have ever seen.

[edited by: TallTroll at 11:10 am (utc) on July 14, 2003]
[edit reason] URL drop [/edit]

[jakeblue]

hey, check out xmartecommerce.com too
I'm a big fan

[USMerch]

osCommerce is a winner. The biggest drawback for you (being an obvious WYSIWYG fan) you most likely be the way it is structured as far as templates.. there are none, except for an add on contribution which basically offers sets of css+minor graphics.. you can modify it to look like anything you want , with practice, and you'd be surprised at the number of big dollar sites that are based on it..

Everything else about it more than meets your requirements..
if you would like info on how to modify the look and feel of osC, just sticky me...

[ecommerce man]

I'd recommend "Interchange". It's flexible, robust and free!

It also offers exccelent scaleability and will handle anything from a few to hundreds of thousands of products. It's also got the best admin user interface of any shopping cart and it's easily customisable.

If you need any more info on it I'm happy to advise.

- Ian

[shmekkyl]

I'm a big fan of Yahoo! Store. It is the most relaible I have ever found, but if you don't have experience working with it, it can be really difficult to get it set up how you want it.

[goldentrout]

shopsite is a perfect cart for newbie to intermediate users.

Ease of Use:
The hosting provider installs the "store/software" for you, you do the rest.

Search Engine Friendliness:
The pages are html, you can tweak pages for good SEO, no long URL's because you control the naming and pages get spidered just fine. I know this one from experience.

Ease of customization:
Yes but there is a slight learning curve to building a custom template.

Scalability:
As many products as you like, start wherever you'd like. Performance is great when run on a linux box.

Scalability;
Statistics, customer tracking stinks frankly. You'll need a seperate statistics package. Most shopsite provider's have good support.

Price:
Can't compete with osCommerce and the like.
It's spendy ($495.00) for the manager but merchant support, UPS shipping, other numerous features and their ease of use make the price comparable to paying a programmer/developer to set up a cart for you.

Bill

[geoinct]

We're becoming fans of Yahoo Store too. It's relatively se friendly, and you can make it even more so (by learning how to include different Page Titles etc for any page).

You’re right about the standard store template, very inflexible. You need to learn how to modify the template, which requires learning Yahoo’s RTML language (fairly easy to learn). We’ve setup two Yahoo stores so far and learn a bit more each time.

[bekyed]

We use actinic catalog and business - it's not cheap but for an out of the box software package in our opinion it is one of the best
www.actinic.com

bek

[Bruce Townsend]

For search engine friendliness, you will find it hard to beat Actinic. I'll be honest and say that I'm biased because I work for the company. But I can virtually guarantee that if you search anywhere for 'buy [almost anything]', you will see a disproportionate number of Actinic sites. Search engines love them. The software generates pure static html; you can edit all the necessary variables; and page names are static, meaningful and editable.

There are loads of other benefits, but I don't want to be accused of being unduly promotional, so I'll shut up before I get carried away... :-)

Whatever you choose, I wish you every success.

Bruce Townsend

[edited by: TallTroll at 2:42 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2003]
[edit reason] Sig file [/edit]

[bunltd]

We're using ClickCartPro on quite a few of our client sites. It will handle anywhere from a few products on up, easily integrates with MySQL, or runs on csv flat files. It's customizable, and products can be added with no knowledge of html via the admin interface. Integrates with a number of merchant's account. Does UPS, USPS, FedEx. It's not expensive ($99). Lots of other features and an active forum of users. We like it.

LisaB