I am looking for advice. After 7 years of using Zencart I thought I would look around and see what was new and interesting in the line of shopping carts. I stumbled across the hosted carts: Volusion, Bigcommerce, and Shopify. They look like a great leap forward, as they are hosted on their servers and have a good deal more security than I normally do. However, they do take away the control that I have with my website right now. I do a lot of my own work, when something bigger goes wrong, I do have a group of "nerds" who help me straighten it out. We have a good relationship and they are honest folk. I have a high volume business and have to be responsible for quite a few orders every month, they are normally all multi-product orders.
The advice I am looking for from you is to answer some simple questions. Is a hosted shopping cart a good idea? If so, which ones have the better reputations? Have you any direct experience with hosted shopping carts? How was it?
I have been in business for 7 years and during that time I have used Zencart as my shopping cart. I have put together a bunch of different things to make it work:
1) QBI which allows my cart to download directly into Quickbooks, it's a small program which just sends down the information. I have had a few problems with it over the years, but basically it works very well. It is a sensitive thing though.
2) I don't use much SEO. I am a niche market vendor and I have used the full force of Google two years ago to try to drive business to my store and it was a miserable failure. I tried a private company before them and that was a miserable failure, too. So, I conclude SEO is a waste of money for my product. So, SEO is not a feature I care about.
3) Shipping, I am using ShipStation and it does a good job. I have not taken the time to connect all of the features but if I am not going to continue with them, I don't want to spend the time and money to hook it all up.
4) Mail Chimp-I send out about 2 newsletters a month to thousands of people.
5) The Zencart itself. I have quite a few add ons for it. I can send client's names and addresses to Mailchimp to sign them up for my newsletter (works well), Sitemap, Apsona ShopAdmin (which is great), sales reports
6) Backup-I have to do this by hand. I have tried the automatic backup from zencart and it has never worked. My webhost is pretty lousy on this, you have to go into the database and manually download a copy to yourself. It's a pain. But it is necessary. As for backing up the site, that is manual as well....Back up with FTP ugh. Not fun.
7) PayPal-I love it. I download my expenses all the time for Quickbooks after formatting them for my financial guy first in Exel.
I want to do the design myself and can re-design someone else's basic look. I am looking for a more efficient set up than what I have if that is possible, also something which takes away the anxiety when something goes wrong (or better yet, something which won't cause the trouble in the first place....just had a major snafu with the current USPS shipping module install and that was a big pain).
Thanks for your advice here. I am sorry if I didn't get all of the terms straight, the idea of hosted websites is pretty new for me having been something of a do it yourselfer. It would be great to spend more time coming up with and making and shipping the product, and less time being my IT department.
The advice I am looking for from you is to answer some simple questions. Is a hosted shopping cart a good idea? If so, which ones have the better reputations? Have you any direct experience with hosted shopping carts? How was it?
I have been in business for 7 years and during that time I have used Zencart as my shopping cart. I have put together a bunch of different things to make it work:
1) QBI which allows my cart to download directly into Quickbooks, it's a small program which just sends down the information. I have had a few problems with it over the years, but basically it works very well. It is a sensitive thing though.
2) I don't use much SEO. I am a niche market vendor and I have used the full force of Google two years ago to try to drive business to my store and it was a miserable failure. I tried a private company before them and that was a miserable failure, too. So, I conclude SEO is a waste of money for my product. So, SEO is not a feature I care about.
3) Shipping, I am using ShipStation and it does a good job. I have not taken the time to connect all of the features but if I am not going to continue with them, I don't want to spend the time and money to hook it all up.
4) Mail Chimp-I send out about 2 newsletters a month to thousands of people.
5) The Zencart itself. I have quite a few add ons for it. I can send client's names and addresses to Mailchimp to sign them up for my newsletter (works well), Sitemap, Apsona ShopAdmin (which is great), sales reports
6) Backup-I have to do this by hand. I have tried the automatic backup from zencart and it has never worked. My webhost is pretty lousy on this, you have to go into the database and manually download a copy to yourself. It's a pain. But it is necessary. As for backing up the site, that is manual as well....Back up with FTP ugh. Not fun.
7) PayPal-I love it. I download my expenses all the time for Quickbooks after formatting them for my financial guy first in Exel.
I want to do the design myself and can re-design someone else's basic look. I am looking for a more efficient set up than what I have if that is possible, also something which takes away the anxiety when something goes wrong (or better yet, something which won't cause the trouble in the first place....just had a major snafu with the current USPS shipping module install and that was a big pain).
Thanks for your advice here. I am sorry if I didn't get all of the terms straight, the idea of hosted websites is pretty new for me having been something of a do it yourselfer. It would be great to spend more time coming up with and making and shipping the product, and less time being my IT department.