With the e-commerce sector booming, the battle for marketshare is more competitive than ever before, with thousands of new businesses entering the online space every year. These businesses are all going after their piece of the e-commerce pie, but before they can start counting profits, one of the biggest hurdles is choosing the right type of e-commerce shopping cart solution to support their business. There are 3 general cart types, and within them, an array of providers, each with their own pros and cons. Hosted Carts – Considered a turnkey solution, hosted carts are pretty much an all-in-one package. The upside is that for a monthly fee, you receive your shopping cart, templates, customer support and security updates as needed. The downside is that customization and the number of templates is limited (which can sometimes effect SEO). The biggest downside to using a hosted cart is that the content that you spend time creating resides within the hosted platform, making moving to another type of cart or custom solution difficult in the long-run. Examples of hosted shopping cart solutions include Shopify, BigCommerce, AmeriCommerce, Volusion and CoreCommerce. Open Source Carts – Built from the ground up, open source shopping carts are most likely your best bet for your e-commerce store. With a huge number of users, and a robust number of 3rd party plug-ins and extensions, open source carts can be customized to look, feel and act exactly as you want. In addition, migrating data from an open source cart to another type of cart is virtually seamless. The biggest consideration if going with an open source cart is the technical expertise to set it up, as well as support it. Many e-commerce owners opt to bring in an e-commerce specialist, and concentrate their own efforts on other aspects of the business. Examples of open source shopping carts include Magento, Zencart, osCommerce and PrestaShop. WordPress Shopping Cart Extension – With almost 70 million websites running on the WordPress platform, it’s no surprise that many e-commerce operators run extensions off of their site to address their shopping cart needs. WordPress not only offers thousands of templates, but the development database is very robust, which means frequent updates and lots of potential support. WordPress is easy to get up and running quickly, and also migrates easily from one host to another. On the flip side, WordPress was never really intended to be an e-commerce solution, therefore product search and order management can be cumbersome for enterprise level e-commerce stores. It’s fine for the short-term and for a limited number of products, but eventually it’s best to move to a true shopping cart solution for user-friendliness and cart optimization. When it comes time to choose a shopping cart, consider the long as well as the short term, and remember, it’s the most important investment you’ll make in your online business.With the e-commerce sector booming, the battle for marketshare is more competitive than ever before, with thousands of new businesses entering the online space every year. These businesses are all going after their piece of the e-commerce pie, but before they can start counting profits, one of the biggest hurdles is choosing the right type of e-commerce shopping cart solution to support their business. There are 3 general cart types, and within them, an array of providers, each with their own pros and cons. Hosted Carts – Considered a turnkey solution, hosted carts are pretty much an all-in-one package. The upside is that for a monthly fee, you receive your shopping cart, templates, customer support and security updates as needed. The downside is that customization and the number of templates is limited (which can sometimes effect SEO). The biggest downside to using a hosted cart is that the content that you spend time creating resides within the hosted platform, making moving to another type of cart or custom solution difficult in the long-run. Examples of hosted shopping cart solutions include Shopify, BigCommerce, AmeriCommerce, Volusion and CoreCommerce. Open Source Carts – Built from the ground up, open source shopping carts are most likely your best bet for your e-commerce store. With a huge number of users, and a robust number of 3rd party plug-ins and extensions, open source carts can be customized to look, feel and act exactly as you want. In addition, migrating data from an open source cart to another type of cart is virtually seamless. The biggest consideration if going with an open source cart is the technical expertise to set it up, as well as support it. Many e-commerce owners opt to bring in an e-commerce specialist, and concentrate their own efforts on other aspects of the business. Examples of open source shopping carts include Magento, Zencart, osCommerce and PrestaShop. WordPress Shopping Cart Extension – With almost 70 million websites running on the WordPress platform, it’s no surprise that many e-commerce operators run extensions off of their site to address their shopping cart needs. WordPress not only offers thousands of templates, but the development database is very robust, which means frequent updates and lots of potential support. WordPress is easy to get up and running quickly, and also migrates easily from one host to another. On the flip side, WordPress was never really intended to be an e-commerce solution, therefore product search and order management can be cumbersome for enterprise level e-commerce stores. It’s fine for the short-term and for a limited number of products, but eventually it’s best to move to a true shopping cart solution for user-friendliness and cart optimization. When it comes time to choose a shopping cart, consider the long as well as the short term, and remember, it’s the most important investment you’ll make in your online business.