I try to participate on the Linkedin Q&A as much as possible. Yesterday someone asked the following question:

“What do you recommend as a hosted ecommerce application for a small business?”

What do you recommend as a hosted ecommerce application for a small business?

I am working on an ecommerce solution for a small business, and would like input on what to consider in selecting a vendor and application. One recommendation is to use oscommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com/) on a hosted solution such as Bluehost. I am going to have about 150 products available to choose and buy using paypal.

Thanks for helping!

This is something I’ve covered before on our blog, and now that I think about it I should have linked to the post, but this covered a little more. Anyway, I was chosen for best answer (Yay!). My response was:

If you are looking for a hosted system, I would suggest looking into Volusion (mentioned earlier) and Shopify. Volusion is a feature rich software so it might be too much for starting out. Shopify is a solution that has a lot of features and is also hosted.

osCommerce is a great platform with a rich community that, in my opinion, is slowly dying. Plus, you will more than likely need to hire a developer to add any extra features you need, adding to cost. The platform is old and almost outdated so you may want to look at other cart solutions out there.

xCart, Magento, and Interspire are also great shopping cart solutions that you would need to host. xCart is similar to osCommerce and has a large community. Magento is fairly new but feature rich. It has a high learning curve but does a lot. The community is continually growing. Interspire is costly, but feature rich.

What you need to do is ask yourself a few questions.
- Price? Do you want a free solution? Will the free solution have everything you want or will you need to hire someone? Will paying for a solution be OK?
- Hosting? Do you want it to hosted? If so, does the company have 99.9% uptime guarantee? Do they have support? If you’re going to host it yourself, where are you going to host it? Will it work with your server choice?
- Support? Does the ecommerce application come with support? Does it cost me? Is it 24/7?
- Features? Does it integrate with whom I will be shipping? Does it integrate with Quickbooks? Does it integrate with my Merchant Account? Can it support coupons and discounts? What type of reporting does it have? Can it support product options? Etc.

These are only a few of the questions I suggest you ask yourself. Once you have these answers, take a look at the various companies mentioned in the answers. Contact their sales AND tech support. Ask them if they meet your criteria. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under E-Commerce Guide | . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.