When you own an ecommerce website it is important to have a shopping cart that provides your customer with ease of searching and buying products off your website. Chances are, if their shopping experience was anything below subpar, they are going to go elsewhere to find their products. Providing your customer with a superior check out system ensures them of legitimacy as well as being more inclined to return to your website for future purchases.
Due to the wide variety of options out there, finding a good shopping cart to use is not always the easiest decision to make. While shopping carts generally all have the same basic features, there are always those much needed features that some will have and others do not. Is it easy to customize? Can you skin it to match the rest of your site? Does it integrate with the payment processor of your choice? How does it handle shipping?
Other features to take into consideration: How large is your catalog or how many products do you have? Do you need a shopping cart capable of handling large catalogs, and if so, how important is ease of organization to you? Or does a shopping cart with a much smaller capacity suit your needs better? Does it integrate with your shipping provider? Does it offer multi-currency support? These are just a few of the many things to think about when selecting your shopping cart.
To help you out in your decision making process, below, is a list of our top 5 shopping carts for DotNetNuke, or DNN, for both small and large business websites.
1. Smith Cart
Smith Cart made it to the top of our list due to its overall power and great functionality. It comes loaded with tons of modules and features to decide what suits your needs best as well as the option to create your own custom check out fields. It is ideal for B2C and B2B Ecommerce websites and is very user friendly with easy to configure back-end settings.
Pros:
-Can handle large product catalog with ease
-Good support response
-Separate ship to and bill to names and addresses
-SEO features titles, descriptions, keywords, and meta tags for each product to allow your products to allow your products to be found
-Automatic thumbnail generation
-SSL supported
-"Fast Checkout" for return customers
-Authorize and settle credit cards automatically
-Automatic email to customer and administrator upon purchase
-No product limit
Cons:
-No wish list
-No product review
-No gift card option
-No multi-language support
-No option to email customers with newsletter
-No re-seller discounts
2. CATALooK
Catalook was designed for the developer so in return it has fully customizable features and canned be skinned to keep in theme with the rest of your website. Catalook is broken down into different modules so you can decide what works best for your website. It also has a feature that places a mini-cart module on every web page that shows the customers current items in cart and total of current order. Catalook also features rentable options for booking things like hotels, cars, ect. While Catalook is at a slightly higher price tag and is packed full of features for just about anything you can think of, it falls into second place due to its lack of SEO tools and is much more difficult during the initial set up. However, the rewards can be great once setup and established.
Pros:
-Quick order forms for B2B transactions
-Reseller discount
-Multi-language support
-Wish list
-Customer registration
-Product reviews
-Email customer and administrator upon purchase
-Shipping calculator integration
-Newsletter
-No product/category limit
Cons:
-No Search Optimization tools
-No gift certificate
-Harder on the developers side during initial installation and set up
3. DNNSpot
DNNSpot is the recommended choice for smaller ecommerce stores that do not have a large product catalog; although it has no product or category limit, it becomes difficult to organize and keep track of items with a large catalog. It was designed more the business person/side rather than the developer so it has very easy installation and is easy to use and understand.
Pros:
-UPS Integration as well as FedEx support with shipping rates and tracking numbers.
-Sell downloadable goods like music files, video files, documents, ect.
-Great SEO (custom title, description, keywords as well as ability to set up what you want the url for that product to read
-Inventory management to keep track of your products
-Customizable email templates
-Option to pay by check or Pay Pal if wished
Cons:
-Not very customizable
-Lacks some of the more detailed oriented features of some of the other carts
-Cannot handle large product catalogs with ease.
-Lacks free shipping option for orders of $X amount.
4. Portal Store
At a slightly higher price tag than the rest of the shopping cart modules, Portal Store offer tons of features and skin layouts built in and pays keen attention to detail to make sure you get the most out of your shopping cart.
Pros:
-Wish Cart
-Digital Purchases
-Multi-currency support with real-time rates with a fixed price adjustment or a manual currency rate entry
-Tons of different payment options included
-Great image and file management with the ability to re-size and watermark images individually or in groups as well as upload individually or in groups
-Comes with 17 modules
-Option to have images in item detail be thumbnails or on a slideshow
-FAQs and reviews with the option to set reviews to be only those customers who have already purchased the item
-Ability to display featured, recommended, or related user purchase products
Cons:
-Not supported on DNN 6
-Not as customizable as far as skinning goes as some of the other shopping carts
-Can be difficult to grasp at first.
5. NB_Store
NB_Store is a free DNN shopping cart module that is great if you are looking for a cheap option for a shopping cart. It has many of the important features you want in a shopping cart but lacks the detailed features and customization of some of the bigger players, but hey, it's free.
Pros:
-Supports multi-language
-Supports multiple tax levels
-Can hold tons of products while still being easy to search and organize large quantities in the manner desired
Cons:
-Can be difficult to understand
-Not very customizable in the look and feel aspect as well as creating custom fields
-Lacks some of the features you might be looking for
These shopping carts can be a bit tricky to set up and take some time and explaining to thoroughly understand. Let
10 Pound Gorilla set these up for you and get your shopping cart online.