Open Source Shopping Carts
Is the only option for an online bookstore one of the larger networks?
No
How about for inventory management? Is that only available through your accounting software?
No
How about your own shopping cart for your site? Will it cost hundreds of dollars?
No, no, no!
Open source applications are available that can provide many of the services you would normally pay for. For this article, I’d like to provide an overview of the available online shopping cart applications you can use for free. I will then follow up with more specifics on each program so you can become familiar with the applications and choose one you feel the most comfortable with.
Beyond Just Book Selling
I have found using an online shopping cart to be beneficial in managing many aspects of book selling:
- Central location for inventory, customers, fulfillment, and revenue
- When using multiple channels in order to sell your stock, it can be difficult to keep track of what has sold, what is available, what needs to be shipped and how much you’ve made. With a central online shopping cart system, you can keep track of all your customers and revenue. Furthermore, you can back it up so you don’t lose the most critical aspect of your business!
- Additional channels for bringing your books to the public
- Your own processing site allows you to take advantage of many other advertising and marketing avenues:
- CraigsList
- Free Classifieds Sites
- Pay Per Click advertising campaigns
- Traditional advertising
- Basically anything you can think of!
- Significant reduction in work maintaining a basic html listing of the books you have available
As you can tell, I think having your own shopping cart system is an excellent way to stay on top of your game. In addition, using an Open Source cart is every bit as good as a commercial version, with a much cheaper bill.
If the thought of installing and maintaining your own shopping cart is too scary - there are also services that will provide installation, support, and maintainence of your shopping cart system for $5.00 to $10.00 per month.
Evaluating Open Source Software
- Is it turnkey?
If you have to customize any of the core software - do not bother with it out the gate. It will cost you a lot to modify and it’s likely there is another package available that will do what you want. - Is it “code based” where you need to modify scripts or “web-interface” based where you can just change a menu option? Make sure you choose a shopping cart that has all the neat features you want, but is not above your skill level. It can be a humbling moment but well worth it in the long run.
- Will it work with your hosting?
Most hosting accounts are Linux based and come with Apache, PHP, and MySQL support. That means they will work with the majority of open source applications. If your hosting is Windows based, you might find it a little more difficult to find open source applications. - Does it support the payment methods you wish to accept?
The easiest payments to accept are cheques, paypal, and merchant accounts that will work with one of the popular merchant gateways that come pre-integrated into the software. - Does it give you control over various shipping methods?
- Does it provide a simple method of processing fulfillments?
If you are evaluating the various open source shopping cart systems with these key components in mind, you should be successful in finding the one that best suits your needs without requiring a lot of modification.
Where To Look
3 of the packages that I’ve looked at (and will review each one more in-depth) are:
Zen Cart - available from www.Zen-Cart.com This is my personal favourite. To see working examples, Zen Cart has a listing of shopping sites that use their cart from their site. In addition, it’s the shopping cart system I use for Vagrants Books.
osCommerce - available from www.osCommerce.com Zen Cart was originally built using this shopping cart as its base. Since then osCommerce and Zen Cart have continued development with their own feature updates. This is definitely worth including in your evaluations.
I will also research Cube Cart and Lizard Cart as 2 more platforms for evaluation.
Don’t forget! If you’d like to contact me to review other systems, please feel free to let me know.
paul [a. t. ] booksellingonlineblog DOT com
