Narrowing down cart choices...

[granyanella]

My wife and I are planning to start a store selling our homemade jewelry. We've narrowed our choices down to x-cart.com and ecommercetemplates.com for the software. Hosting-wise we can choose either but we're now down to making the choice so would appreciate any feedback from anyone who has used either. We don't mind getting our hands dirty with the code and have set up a few regular and affiliate sites but this will be our first venture into ecommerce.

Thanks for your time.

[Ariana]

Hi there,
I was evaluating the same 2 carts six months back.. I can't remember what exactly made me go with ecommercetemplates over xcart, but I have been extremely happy with my decision. I've built about 5 sites with it so far (well a few are still in development) the most finished being www.hookmarks.com. I would recommend the PHP version if you have a choice because there are many more mods available than for ASP and there are some mods that you will definitely want (image upload for example.) Speaking of which the froogle mod is great too!

If you have any specific questions about ecommercetemplates feel free to ask, hopefully someone with xcart experience will post here too.

Good luck!

[jestep]

How many different products are you planning on selling?

It may be better as far as promotion and creating a very personal site if you make your own shopping cart system. You can save a lot of money doing this and if you don't have a ton of product fields, then it may be a better system. You will definitely end up with a faster and better suited for your specific business shopping cart if you custom make one, or have one made just for your site.

Since you are selling a homemade product, it is especially important to have a percieved personal relationship with your customers. This will set your site apart from the thousands of other sites out there.

All in one solutions aren't made to work perfectly with every product type and they almost always look like a cookie cutter site when they're finished.

Just my opinion, but there is quite a bit of marketing and design experience to back it up.

Jamie

[Easy Web 4 U]

Hi,

I'm not familiar with either one, I just wanted to say hi. :)

I'd be interested in seeing pictures of your jewelry once you have your website set up.

Teresa

[big_harry]

I agree with jestep, although sometimes it is a tough sell to a customer to get them to see that spending the extra money up front will pay off in the end; even with testimonials.

Often my customers want to start off with the cookie cutter thinking they will replace it later when business picks up. Problem is they never see the real potential for thier site from that initial mistake and then they don't want to spend the money later on because the site is not doing as well as they would like.

Harry

[roban]

All important in your decision should be the kind of support you can avail yourselves of in the likely event you will need advice. Check out the forums associated with your potential choices. It will make a huge difference.

[Ariana]

Just wanted to chime in here.. I use ecommercetemplates.com for all my clients ecommerce sites. I have found it to be EXCELLENT and the support community has been incredibly helpful, even when what I was asking to do was very far off base for a normal ecommerce function.

There hasn't really been anything I haven't been able to do with the addition of a reasonably priced mod of which there are plenty to choose from. Its true that in some sense the stores look "cookie cutter" in their functionality, but I have 2 comments about that:

1) There are tried and true techniques that have been found to be effective in ecommerce such as related product suggestions (upsell), list of popluar products, etc. etc. which is why my sites have a similar feel (because I keep buying the same mods because they work so well!)

2) A lot of your look and feel is going to depend on how much time and effort you spend customizing your store's look and adding in mods and features. The people who pretty much use the standard template and don't do any custom design are going to have sites that look very similar to eachother.

Here are 2 examples of sites that I have built using ecommercetemplates: www.hookmarks.com This one is complete, though I am in the process of upgrading it.

http://www.hautekidture.com/products.php?cat=13 This one I'm still adding products to and the homepage is still "coming soon" but you can get the idea for the layout.

As I said there are similarities between these two carts, but that has more to do with the fact that I'm using the same mods for both (mostly) and the designer is the same (ME!) because if you look at the template I started with, http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/dw...virtualsilver/you won't recognize it too much.

Having said all that, plan to spend around $100 on mods on top of the template itself. You will at minimum want the image upload mod. Other mods I find indespensible are the froogle mod, the related items mod, the top sales mod and the category headings mod. Still, even with the extra mod $ your talking about a great price. Feel free to ask any specific questions you have, I'd say I'm now an intermediate user at least :)

[Ariana]

Oops, posted twice by accident.