Shopping Cart Software Comparison – which do you go For?

At first, the idea of getting a shopping cart for your e-commerce website almost seems minor enough – like an afterthought. It's only when you actually get down to deciding how to go about it that you see how fantastically complicated it can get. For instance, do you go get a free shopping cart or a paid one? If you decide to go paid for the extra features, do you get a hosted one or should you buy one? For the most part, you get the most flexibility with a purchased solution that you host yourself. Getting one hosted turns out to be more expensive in the long run and you don't get to customize anything the way you want it either. This shopping cart software comparison should get you thinking about the three top products and shopping carts today.

Let's start with the shopping cart from Pinnacle, the Pinnacle Cart. This product, that costs $30

a month to use, is the most fully featured shopping cart product in the world. From customer management to inventory tracking, this is a feature set that you couldn't find fault with if you sat down and thought about it for a day. But this doesn't mean that it's difficult for the newbie to use. Pinnacle certainly has learned to make its software accessible. Nevertheless, a feature set this complicated simply has to be conceptually difficult for anyone to grasp. If you are only starting out, you probably should stay away from this one. For this reason, in this shopping cart software comparison Pinnacle would be your fall-back option. The Pinnacle cart gives you excellent web design options -- you get to optimize your URLs in every way, generate meta-tags for your pages, modify your CSS files from your Internet browser, design dozens of button styles for your pages and so on. You get to integrate your e-commerce website with Facebook, and you get industry standard PCI and PA data security.

ShopSite Pro, that costs $125 to buy and $125 a month to use. This is not software you download and install a computer. You just log on to the website and get going in minutes. ShopSite Pro allows you rich and detailed web design features and you don't even need web design skills to do anything. You can use the wizard to get your store online in a few easy steps. For those who want all the professional features -- credit card processing, inventory control, security -- with no professional skills, this is the product to go for.

BigCommerce is, in general, considered the most fully featured product to go for in any shopping cart software comparison, usually. Of the two products we've seen above, the first one has features to die for, and the second one has ease of use that is unmatched. BigCommerce is the product to go to when you want the best of both worlds.