It’s that time of the year again. Down with the 2011 version and up with the 2012 version of which shopping cart is best. As always this is my list and based on the last 12 months developing and optimising shopping carts so you need to take it as gospel. Feel free to use the comments below to disagree with me (or heaven forbid agree with me) your experiences provide valuable tips and guidence to veryone that comes here wondering what shopping cart to use.
5 Best Shopping Carts for 2012.
BigCommerce
The most features, very good looking, very stable and 24/7 support. Only two real downsides. No wholesale customer supprt (I don’t care what they say) and you need a seperate account for every store you setup. [Read BigCommerce Review]
Shopify
Very simple to setup and use. If you have beautiful products you need Shopify to do them justice. If you just want to sell products checkout Shopify before you check the others. It generally costs more by the time you buythe addons you need but the user experience is unparalleled. [Read Shopify Review - coming tomorrow]
Americommerce
Have more than one store? Wish you could run them all from one backend? Get Americommerce and you can. You also get excellent SEO, built in newsletters and affiliate programs, lots of reports and statictics, marketing and promotional tools [Read Americommerce Review]
CoreCommerce
CoreCommerce updates more frequently than any other shopping cart software. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of ecommerce and give your sales every new benefit CoreCommerce is the cart you want to be on. [Read CoreCommerce Review]
Pinnacle Cart
The best marketing tools in the industry make Pinnacle a must have on every top 5 list. Drift marketing, Global Price Sales and Product Update Emails will send your sales through the roof. If your sales have been weak consider a look at Pinnacle Cart. [Read Pinnacle Cart Review]
Notable Mention for 2012
1ShoppingCart. This would have been in my top 5 had I known about it earlier. The usual features, great support and history and lots of marketing tools make this a great choice for retailers in competitive markets. Worth taking for a free test drive if you are assessing carts I think you will be impressed.
Ashop Commerce. Wonderful cart, includes an Australian version for the Aussies (including toll free support, Australia Post and all major banks supported). Beautiful free themes and solid SEO basis and tools. No matter where you are in the world Ashop will give you excellent ecommerce, I can not wait to work with this platform again. [Read Ashop Commerce Review]
Volusion is back in favour. It is still the most difficult shopping cart to make look good but they have made some dramatic changes in the latest release to make the back end administration much easier to use. It is still rather overwhelming but at least if you need to use Volusion you will not go crazy in the process. [Read Volusion Review]
Best Licensed Shopping Cart Software in 2012
Interspire – although i suspect it will be gone soon, the updates are getting fewer and further between. I love the cart and you can still use it but yo might need to find a developer to back you up when BigCommerce engulfs Interspire and they can it.
Lemonstand – still a massive memory hog though but a good server can take it. Don’t use it at a budget shared host though
Pinnacle Cart – same reasons as hosted
KonaKart – A solid Java entry – don’t move to Java just to use it, but if you are on Java it is a great product with a solid feature set
AspDotNetStorefront – the best cart for a windows environment (without PHP), even supports multistore wonderfully. Worth a look for any organisation.
Best Free Cart of 2012
None. Thats a trick question. Ecommerce software is something you should invest in. If you try and do it cheap you will suffer and so will your sales. Hosted shopping cart platforms cost on average $25/month if that is too much to spend you need to rethink what you are planning.
Best Shopping Cart for WordPress
WP e-commerce
It costs less than a case of beer, has a huge list of eager supporting developers and has been continually improved by it’s New Zealand developer until it has seamless integration into WordPress and a very consistent interface.
Best low cost ecommerce platforms
WP e-commerce Gold Cart – $40.00
Limited Run – Free or starting at $5/month Read my Limited Run Review
BigCartel – $9.99/month
CoreCommerce – $19.99/month
Shopping Carts to avoid in 2012
Magento and Magento GO
Simply put magento in any form is the most complicated and expensive shopping cart experience you can have. Give it a wide berth.
osCommerce
osCommerce was old 8 years ago, in 2012 it is just plain sad. On the bright side it hasn’t had a new release in almost a year so perhaps it is finally on it’s way out.
ZenCart
ZenCart, like osCommerce is just plain old. Worse though than osCommerce is that ZenCart designers and store owners all seem to be colour blind. I still have a headache form the last Zencart site I had to fix.
Conclusion
There is no conclusion I just didn’t want to end the article on ZenCart that would be tragic. I will come back to this in a couple of days once you have all picked my recommendations to pieces. In the meanwhile leave a comment, I love comments.
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