E-Commerce is bigger than a sasquatch these days. If you have goods or services to sell, you may as well sell them on your website. The only hurdle, however, is choosing the right shopping cart to suit your needs. There are so many out there and it can be hard to know where to start. WebRulon to the rescue. Here are eighteen popular shopping carts that could send your e-business to the next level.

Free Carts

AgoraCart – The free version of AgoraCart still contains the bells and whistles the paid product is known for.  However, if you upgrade to the gold version you will get access to more modules and support. Goodie!

Batavi – Started an 2007 by osCommerce core-team members and ICEshop members because they felt that eCommerce 3.0 was not advancing as they had hoped. With that in mind, Batavi offers  customer- and group-specific pricing, payment and shipping modules, related products for crossselling and upselling, product price rules for pricing large product volumes and many other features that make it very friendly for business-to-business selling.

Magento – This was also began as a osCommerce offshoot but the developers soon decided to build the program from the ground up. They ended up building it on the Zend Network and the cart is PHP-based and is available as an open source option with extra modules that can be installed.

OFBiz – Apache OFBiz may be the perfect solution for all of your enterprise business needs. It’s easy, simple to use and a good match for any sized business.

OpenCart – OpenCart is another open source platform for all of your commerce needs. This one has more bells and whistles than usual, too. It supports a full templating system, support for over 20 payment gateways, over 8 different payment gateways, unlimited categories and products and more.

osCommerce – The best known shopping cart on the block, osCommerce has been around the bend and then some. It’s so popular, in fact, that lots of other carts are based on this humble and all-seeing program. What does it offer? A constantly growing developer community that continues to develop new plugins to make this shopping cart do everything but clean the windows. Also, the front end of the cart is highly customizable. This might be the gold standard.

PrestaShop – PrestaShop runs on PHP and MySQL and has an extensive admin panel. The system allows you to have orders placed for out of stock items, package tracking, merchandise return and so much more. There’s also access to lots of expansion modules for free.

Satchmo – Satchmo was originally designed in Python, as an attempt to overcome the limitations of PHP. However, Python was abandoned in favor of the Django web application. It includes many features such as PDF invoice generation, automatic thumbnail generation, inventory tracking and a whole lot more.

Ubercart – Ubercart was developed to work with Drupart, as such the program can be fully integrated with your site and community on any server that can run PHP or MySQL. It works best with companies that feature only a limited number of items to sell.

VirtueMart – VirtueMart started it’s life as a plugin named mambo-PHPShop. However, that faded when Mambo merged with Joomla. The cart still requires Joomla to work and as such may be viable for a small percentage o f businesses. It runs on PHP and MySQL, and is capable of supporting an unlimited number of products and categories.

Zen Cart – Zen Cart was built off of the popular OSCommerce framework and features a templating system and  some popular osCommerce plugins  such as the gift certificate module. It is PHP-based and uses MySQL databases.

Fee-based shopping carts

Avactis – This cart has tons of bells and whistles, including real-time shipping calculation, multiple currencies, sales reports, marketing etc. It’s PHP/MySQL based and it’s tag based cart system that allows you to add the system to any web site of your choice, whether it’s a static site or not. Also, there’s even a free limited service trial period. Good going!

CubeCart – CubeCart is another template driven PHP/MySQL driven cart. It does have some cool perks, including  tax by state/zone or country, inventory control, gift certificates and more. The company also offers free updates and more plugin modules than you can shake a stick at.

Magellan Commerce – Magellan, in addition to being a great explorer, also knew a thing or two about e-commerce. As such, Magellan Commerce is a serviceable cart that could suit your needs quite nicely. It offers over 30 templates, real time shipping calculators, order and inventory tracking and a lot more.

ProductCart – ProductCart is written in ASP and relies heavily on AJAX to speed up the consumer experience. The system can also integrate with your current site if you prefer to building one totally on top of the cart. The feature set is more extensive than it would seem.

ShopSite – This cart allows you to add buttons to an existing site, quite handy. You can also build an entire site with their functional and easy to use wizard. ShopSite offers three levels of subscription to its shopping cart system, or you can pay one time fees for the top two tiers of service. Perfect for those e-businesses who want a full featured site without the headache.

ViArt – ViArt is a PHP cart that comes with lots of options. There is a free version but skips out on so much functionality, you are better off coughing up the beans. ViArt also provides you with a full CMS and Help Desk that can be integrated into the online store.

X-Cart – X-Cart offers different versions of its software to match the different needs of you, the e-merchant. From the most basic version on up it features a CSS-based layout for customization, MySQL databases, search engine friendly and more. Not a bad little cart.

2010 is upon us. Get ready for another round of changes of both the monumental and incremental variety. Our friends as Last Exit have compiled a list of digital marketing trends for the new year. Some will seem obvious, others not so much.  Read on to discover how the new year will play out:

1. Facebook continues it ’s eventual replacement of personal e-mail – This is already happening, thanks to the massive pre-existing userbase of Facebook and a few key conveniences that sites like Gmail and Yahoo can’t offer. For one, you don’t have to remember any e-mail addresses. Just ring up your friends name and it’s message time. It even has a chat functionality built in. But don’t worry, Facebook still hasn’t made a dent into business e-mail. Maybe in 2011.

2.The Cloud Helps Open-Source Software Make Proper Money – Open-source software projects that were typically a tiny niche market are  now available to the masses. In this example, Beanstalk, a fully hosted, version-controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open-source project has created a subscription based service that – for a small fee – removes the hassle of setting up Subversions and maintaining those pesky servers.Cloud computing infrastructures is the only way to make this kind of business model profitable.  Companies like Beanstalk don’t have to upfront capital outlay for servers. With the right skills any open-source project can be commercialized this way. Bring it on.

3.Mobile commerce finally comes into it’s own -  Mobile commerce was something of a joke until the iPhone app store took the world by storm in the past year or so. This trend will continue as the new Google Nexus phone enters the fray and other companies finally play catch-up with Apple’s business models. Expect your all-in-one smart phones to be able to do all sorts of new things, for a fee, by this time next year.

4. Fewer registrations, less annoyances - How tired are we of remembering password after password after password? We are lazy, dammit! Well, companies are listening. This has already begun to happen. Notice once you sign into your Gmail account, you can pretty much do anything within the Google network. More companies will partner up to make this a reality amongst different websites. You should probably change your password from “hello” already, though. It’s 2010.

5. DIY culture comes into it’s own – Call it DIY culture, Web 2.1, or whatever you want. It’s here to stay. Sites like Cafe Press, Etsy, and even old stalwarts like eBay allow people to run their own businesses from the comforts of their own home. Etsy in particular has turned into a huge success story, allowing people to produce and sell their own art for whatever price they choose. And, of course, Etsy gets a cut. Not a bad deal for them.

6.Crowd Sourcing – Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of various outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special-interest groups to not only carry a message but also to lead and take part in activities on their behalf. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, expect to see huge growth in crowdsourcing models provoked and led, in large part, by digital social media strategies.

7.Flash overtakes the universe – Every year likes to predict the death of flash, simpler is better after all. That’s a load of podunk, though. Flash is not only here to stay, but it will be wrapping it’s sinewy tentacles into every aspect of the Internet experience this year.  Thanks in part to Adobe’s rich media tool. Also, several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash-built websites no longer serve up single, impenetrable pages. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. Which is good for all of us.

Well that’s it for now. Let’s meet back here at the end of year and see how wrong we were. Isn’t that part of the fun?

There are many ways to maximize your ecommerce business.  There are also many ways to miss opportunities.  Selling goods online is a great way to expand your business.  Here are a few ways to make sure you don’t over-look some of the basics.  These no-brainer tips can really help your ecommerce business.

1. Detailed product descriptions

When trying to compete with brick and mortar business, you have to make the consumer aware of your product with words.  In a physical store, the consumer can literally pick up and interact with the product.  We are years away from augmented reality so we have to use descriptions to accurately portray the details of our products.  Sizes, materials, weight, dimensions, and any other pertinent information depending on what the product is. Simple things like sizes and colors available, a size chart (usually linked from multiple products), the weight or thickness of the item, the cut and fit of the item, care instructions, and comments about the brand or designer are often over looked. Using descriptive words can help the consumer relate to the product.  Lack of detail will cause an online shopper to look elsewhere for more info which is not good for you.

2. Making “Contact Us” information available at all times.

Some people have had bad experiences with online customer service.  Online sales is all about trust.  A consumer should not feel like the retailer is trying to make contact complicated. Having persistent contact information is a vital. Email, phone, address, anything and everything only helps build consumer confidence.

3.  Cumbersome or long checkout.

In e-commerce the obvious goal is conversion.  Such a simple concept, yet so many retailers fail to provide consumers with an easy checkout process.  You ideally want a short and clear method of purchase.  The shortest and easiest path to entry of payment information will yield higher conversions.  Having too many steps to finish at checkout only gives the consumer more chances to navigate away.  The best solution is single page checkout.  This allows the customer to review the cart and enter information.  That is followed by a confirmation page.  Consolidate what you can and keep your consumer engaged.

4.  Registration or account requirement.

An old technique to capture user information was a required registration.  This is similar to the topic above, but you have consider the rate of abandonment.  Making the sale is obviously more important then data collection in e-commerce.  There is a simple solution to this.  Offer to save or create the account after the purchase.  All the information has already been entered and you can entice them to register by indication order tracking and other options are available when you register.  The consumer will be less resistant since the order is complete, the information is already entered, and there is now a perceived value.

5.  Site product searching ability.
Wouldn’t it be great if your customer can easily find what they are looking for? Sounds sarcastic, right? It is a sad truth, most sites do not provide a useful enough search method. The use of filters and categories can help the consumer refine their search to their needs. A search that either returns too much or not relevant data is frustrating for the consumer. Your e-commerce platform should have a solid search engine. Plugins are also available for many platforms to extend the search capability. Results should be sortable as well. This gives the consumer as many tools to make a decision as they need. That then provides a valid shopping experience.

6. Customer Service options.
The best place to start is to have a useful and relevant FAQ. This may be able to solve most consumers questions with out the need of making contact. The next step is to have a detailed customer contact page. A great way to manage customer service is through a ticketing system. This allows for very targeted service. If this is not a viable solution, there are other simple ways to provide better service. You can set up a customer service email or number for the specific areas of interest. An example would be to have a sales channel, an orders channel, technical channel, etc. This helps the customer avoid a wild goose chase.

7. Product image size.
Let’s face it. Online shopping is not a very tangible experience. If you want to compete with your brick and mortar pals, try to make you products as visual as possible. Blurry or small pictures do not help consumers visualize the product. Use clear and large pictures to show your product.

8. Number or product images.
This goes hand and hand with point number 7 above. Along with large clear images, having more then one helps visualize the product. Showing different angles and size reference shots will greatly improve your customers shopping experience. Showing colors and variations are also very important. If it is an item that has multiple parts, show them all.

9. Shopping cart layout.
The presentation and features of your cart are vital to the shopping experience. The ability to have multiple items in the cart and manipulate quantities are essential. The path of progress from adding an item is important too. Ideally you want to have the consumer add the item to the cart and either return them to the last page they were on, or never leave that page to begin with. Another great idea is to have the items in the cart be links. So if the customer wants to recheck something they can easily go to the product info. If you can make a pop up that covers this, it will keep you customer in the cart and closer to check out.

10. Payment option limitation.
This is truly basic but sometimes overlooked. Yes most people have a Visa or Mastercard. Some people also have AMEX, Google Checkout, PayPal, etc. Integration of these payment gateways are not that hard to do but add a tremendous value to your consumers. A lot of those services offer protection, which leads to consumer comfort.

11. Upselling related products.
Not only are related products helpful to consumers, it also can fuel more sales. Just like when a store puts batteries next to electronics so that it can remind you that you may need some. If the item is part of a set why not remind them that there are more things that go with it?

12. Navigational chaos.
Like many of the other topics discussed here, ease of use is important. We talked about searching, this is the other end of it. What if a customer does not know exactly what they want, and are looking to browse. If you can make your site navigation logical and easy to traverse then you are adding value to the consumer. Instead of a customer not being able to find the item that they need, you may now have a customer that has found a genre of things they need.

13. Shipping information.
Not understanding how much shipping is going to cost can be a huge deterrent. You might have found that the TV you found for dirt cheap has a $400 shipping charge. That would be frustrating to find out when your about to confirm your order. Too many sites do not show shipping until you are checking out. This withholding of information is not useful at all to anyone. Give the consumer all the info they need to proceed with the order. Explain shipping rates, have shipping calculators, and show any shipping based deals.

14. Hard to find store policies.
It is helpful for the consumer to know what the shipping, returns, and other rules are for your business. While a lot of this can be covered in an FAQ its still important to be as clear with this as you can. Restating it in another location is a good idea too. Transparency is reassuring to the consumer.

15. Product centric focus.
This one seems pretty obvious, right? Do not make your site so busy that it is hard to focus on the products. Product representation is first and foremost. Use styles that emphases products. Think about a brick and mortar store, they have feature locations and displays and you should too. Do what ever you can to keep the consumer focused on products.