Top Considerations for Selecting an Online Shopping Cart

There are so many different shopping cart providers today, how do you know what to look for when selecting one? The answer ultimately lies in knowing which software will adapt and grow with your business best. As I see it, there are four absolutely critical things that must be considered when setting up an online store and selecting an online shopping cart:

1. Cloud solution or self-hosted (downloadable) cart? In short, you need to decide which variant is better for you. A self-hosted cart is a good choice if you have an in-house technical team to customize it. However, a self-hosted model also increases your maintenance costs for hosting, developing, and implementing security updates and software upgrades. For these reasons, this solution is usually recommended for medium-sized businesses and fast-growing companies.

A cloud solution is usually better for starter and beginner merchants, since shopping cart providers do most of the heavy technical lifting themselves, leaving you to concentrate only on generating sales. It's generally paid for on a monthly/annual basis, and/or through a percentage of sales transactions.

2. Ensure there's support for the latest mobile innovations. The mobile commerce opportunity is huge, so any shopping cart under consideration should support the most cutting-edge innovations in this space. There are two common approaches to the modern challenge of designing web pages that work on small and large screens.

Adaptive design was developed to meet the diverse needs of a growing number of cell phones with different capabilities and screen sizes. Adaptive design requires organizations to create many different versions of each web page and install complex programming on web servers that detects each device and delivers a version of the site optimized for the specific size and features of that cell phone visitor.

A new, simpler approach called responsive design is quickly gaining popularity. With responsive design, organizations can create one web page and then use multiple sets of CSS rules to change the format and layout based on the size of the browser window. Responsive design responds to changes in width of a browser window by fluidly adjusting the placement of elements on a web page to best fit the available space. Thus, as users drag the side of a browser to make the web page larger or smaller, they can see the design change in real time.

Implementing responsive design is one of Google's top recommendations for businesses looking to optimize their sites for mobile devices. Responsive design certainly offers many advantages, but the fact is that it hasn't generally been used for shopping carts and e-commerce sites. Many shopping carts are simply not adept at arranging content for optimal viewing on various mobile device screens. Therefore, it's critical to consider if a shopping cart is "responsive design compliant" — i.e., flexible, adaptable and fluid; automatically detecting when a screen is narrow and adjusting storefront content accordingly.

3. Consider the value of a vibrant partner ecosystem. The fact is that store features are changing all the time, and online merchants must gain access to greater functionality quickly and easily, helping them be more successful. Leading shopping cart providers are now organizing community ecosystems for shopping cart module extensions.

Vibrant partner ecosystems benefit the whole community. The best developers are strongly incentivized to participate, since they can make commissions from sales from their extensions to online merchants. The range of possibilities for online merchants is vastly broadened. Furthermore, the shopping cart providers themselves can tap the broader developer community for innovative features and functions.

4. Make certain you're future-proofed. Even though a chosen e-commerce platform may have a lot of features and suit a merchant's needs today, there will almost certainly come a time when the merchant needs to customize some business logic into the platform. In the past, if an online merchant using a hosted shopping cart needed to change a major feature like a shipping provider, it would most likely need to switch its shopping cart. Not an optimal solution! Remember, change is constant, and you should be able to modify anything in your store, at any time.

To date, the drawback of the hosted approach is that customization options have been limited. For example, hosted shopping cart providers often have predefined templates that an online merchant can choose from to customize look and feel, which may limit how much software modification is possible.

APIs and applications have always allowed organizations to build custom logic, but this isn't the same as having the ability to change core functionality. To address this, some hosted shopping cart providers have taken the innovative step of making source code available to developers and designers, giving them total control over the code and design of stores as well as the end-user experience. Developers can change anything they want to — e.g., web design, extra features and even core functionality — as well as easily extend store capabilities.

An e-commerce shopping cart is the heartbeat of any online retail site. When selecting a shopping cart, it's important to choose one that can be customized to match your business and be flexible enough to grow with your business. Above all else, you want a shopping cart that combines ease-of-use and flexibility (without making you choose); collaborates with the broader community to bring cutting-edge innovations to you faster and more comprehensively; and supports the latest mobile innovations and can change and grow with your business. These criteria hold true whether you wish to remain small or be the next Amazon.com.

Max Vydrin is the CEO of X-Cart, an online shopping cart software provider.