Free Shopping Cart Review: Highwire Commerce
Highwire Commerce has been gaining in popularity with their free shopping cart solution, as it is a great way for people to sell digital goods like software or music. Formerly known as BuyItSellIt, Highwire Commerce provides a free online store that has almost all the great features that they offer in their paid solution. There are no set up or transaction fees when you choose to set up an online store for free, this provides you the ability to sell up to 10 products and have 10 MB in file storage. The free online store solution is hosted and provides you with unlimited bandwidth, a custom domain, and templates. There are a few things missing from the free cart software like a Secure SSL checkout, discounts codes, and unlimited staff log-ins. Not having the secure SSL checkout means that you cannot sell items directly through the Highwire checkout system, instead you must hook up PayPal to your Highwire shopping cart and all sales must go through PayPal. This requires accessing the HTML of your store product pages and pasting in PayPal payment button embed code. This can get a bit clunky for a merchant, which is why most merchants upgrade to their paid packages for easier selling online. Highwire's paid packages offer more features and the ability to have more than just downloadable products in your online store, with prices ranging from $14.95 to $49.95 if you ever want to upgrade from their free online shopping cart.
The free cart from Highwire Commerce has many people from Ebay and Etsy trying it out as another way to have an online store. Musicians also use the free online store to sell their albums and merchandise, as 10 products allow them to offer up a nice variety of inventory. In terms of features, the Highwire Commerce platform has an excellent offering which will allow you to easily set up an online store so you can start selling. The design process is quick as you can use their template, but still have full access to the HTML and CSS so you can customize elements to fit the brand for your free online store. Product management is simple with the tools in Highwire Commerce as it will allow you to easily manage your inventory to make sure you can accommodate all orders. Once you have a nice design and products in your online store, you can move on to utilize the marketing features like built in SEO tools. Highwire Commerce also allows integration with Twitter, Elefy, Google Merchant Feeds, and 3rd party email to give you the ability to expand the reach on your online store powered by their free ecommerce software.
Customers checking out of your free shopping cart from Highwire Commerce must go through PayPal or Google Checkout and you must work with either of these payment gateways seperately to manage your payments. The paid versions of Highwire Commerce don't have this drawback, because they provide a fully functional SSL Checkout that includes integrated shipping options through FedEx, UPS, USPS, and Canada Post. For most merchants, Highwire's free shopping cart is mainly a testing platform rather than the online store they want to end up with. Because of the work arounds to get products actually selling (which sometimes don't work), Highwire's free shopping cart does not provide the best opportunities for someone wanting to start selling online immediately, but does provide a great free online store to get your feet wet with ecommerce.
