A Beginner's Guide to Shopping Cart Comparison

There are tons of shopping carts and ecommerce solutions out there, but finding the best one for you can be tricky. One of the best ways to make a decision is to perform your own shopping cart comparison. The process can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, but for a beginner, there are just a few basic steps to compare and contrast a few different shopping carts to help you make your decision.

Establish Your Wants/Needs

Before you can begin the actual shopping cart comparison itself, you need to decide what criteria by which you are going to judge the different carts. Price is always a big factor. Figure out how much you are willing to spend.

Most ecommerce solutions include a setup fee. Licensed services, where you download the software and host it on a server of your choosing, usually don't have a monthly fee. Hosted services typically include a monthly fee. Decide first which type of shopping cart you want: licensed or hosted. Comparing the two against each other is sort of like apples to oranges. Either way, decide how much you are going to spend (either initially for licensed, or monthly for hosted) and use that as one comparison field.

Keep in mind most hosted ecommerce solutions have multiple service levels with different attributes: storage space, number of products, etc. These different levels come with different costs. This is an important consideration for your shopping cart comparison. It does no good to try to evaluate the least expensive package from one software company as compared to the mid-range option from another company.

What other needs do you have? Storage space and bandwitdth are also important considerations. How many items will your store have? How much do you know about SEO? Are SEO and social media tools important to your business plan? Look at different shopping carts used by e-stores that you patronize and respect. List the attributes that they have that you would like to have in your own online store.

Determine the Shopping Carts You Will Be Comparing

Once you've picked out your wants/needs and surveyed a selection of sites that you respect, pick out a short list (two to four) sites to compare head to head. Your survey of sites can be a great place to pick out likely candidates. You can usually find out the shopping cart provider by checking the site's "About Us" page or looking for the phrase "powered by __________" somewhere on the site (usually the bottom of the page). If that fails you can always access the shopping cart, then view the page source. There should be a mention of the shopping cart company somewhere in the code.

Perform Your Head-to-Head Shopping Cart Comparison

There are many ways in which you can perform your shopping cart comparison. One of the simplest ways is to create a simple comparison table like the one below, and fill it in with the appropriate information:

Entry Level Packages:

As you can see, we're only comparing the entry-level package from all three carts. The three of them all have different prices, but they are within our max cost per month ($25). Our store will have less than 50 items, so all three stores have enough space to handle our needs. It's a new store, so we don't have a really great idea of how much bandwidth we'll need, but about 1 gigabyte per month seems pretty standard for entry level carts. SEO support is present for all three, but we can see that ZShop has some limitations. Customer service also has its limitations for Cart X. All three carts have their pros and cons.

Breaking the Tie

The three carts above are very easily matched, but even if one is the clear winner, it's still a good idea to collect a bit more information before you make a big decision like picking a shopping cart solution. Go out and find user reviews and professional evaluations for the ecommerce solution you want to try to support or cancel out the results of your shopping cart comparison. Check our other guides for information about how to read shopping cart reviews and what to look for in a high-quality shopping cart or ecommerce solution review. Finally, to compare the best shopping carts side by side, view our shopping cart comparison chart.