You have made the right investments in designing and hosting your ecommerce website. You have tied up with the necessary vendors for the products and services you intend selling on your website and have also implemented a state of the art payment processing system. Now you require putting in place functional shopping cart software that is easy to use for the customers and complements your business model perfectly.
Essentially, shopping cart software is something that allows your customers to order products, put them into the virtual shopping basket and finally make the payment through their credit card. It is therefore very important to select the right system along with appropriate management tools to facilitate the smooth running of your business and allow you to concentrate on your core competencies of marketing and making your website more popular.
You have the choice of going in for a paid shopping cart or a free open source shopping cart software. However, the latter is fraught with risks as mentioned below:
- Going in for a free open source shopping software means that you would have to take care of the necessary set up of the software, integrate applications and maintenance of the software, which will divert your attention from your core competence, which is your business. You would have to spend time understanding the protocol which may not always be consistent and in tune with your requirements. Changing them to suit your business could be time consuming and costly as well.
- Such software can give you intermittent problems and you would then be spending time rectifying it rather than attending to your business. You are thus very much on your own to solve the problems and in the e – commerce business; you do not have the luxury of time to experiment with solutions. Paid software will have their technical back up team to help you out in case of any problem.
- Since this software is a key component of your business model, it needs to be installed right the very first time and you cannot afford experimentations. With paid software, trusted experts will install the system the right way.
- Security is a very important consideration in the ecommerce business and all financial transactions through your website need to be secured such that they cannot be tampered with. With open source free software, you can never be sure whether all security aspects have been addressed so that there is absolutely no chance of any fraud.
- Compatibility with modern day gizmos is another issue that you will not be sure with open source software and this compatibility is particularly crucial for the ecommerce business where innovations in terms of gizmos and their role in facilitating online payment is becoming very necessary.
- You may not get regular updates, leaving you stuck with one version.
- Flexibility is another criterion that you need to consider, which may not be forthcoming from open source free shopping cart software. This could impact you when you are required to add or modify certain fields to suit your growing ecommerce business.
- Since information is sent to a shared server, the processing time for your customers could drag and that could lead to dissatisfaction and they could quit your site without making the purchase.
It is thus important to remember that a free product may not necessarily be the best option and you need to weigh all options before going in for software critical to your business.