Shopping cart software

I've been often asked, "Which shopping cart do you use". Well.... I use a heavily modified version of an open source package called VP-ASP.

By nature, an online store is a complex thing, and although you should never get primarily wrapped up in "bells and whistles", shopping sites in each niche industry have features that are expected, and to be competitive in that niche, you must have them. For this reason, any generic shopping cart solution must be customised from the ground up in order to be effective. The package must allow for this.

I used to use a package called EziMerchant, but it has too many limitations. Ezimerchant is an Australian company who sell a javascript based shopping cart package. It is highly customizable, but it gets really slow with over 2500 products, because it loads all the product data up via javascript when any page of the site is loaded. All the pages are generated as HTML and Javascript on a PC, and are then uploaded to sit on the server as static pages. Orders are stores on the Ezimerchant transaction server until you download them to your PC using the client program. It's a neat, relitively simple package. I'd use it again quite happily, but not on a site selling more than 1000 products, even then, better to keep it below 200, as page load time kills sales. Potential customers will give you the flick after about 15 seconds, especially if they have just clicked on your page among a large list of similar search results.

VP-ASP is much more complex, does more, harder to set up, but is fully featured and customizable. It runs a database on your web server, and uses ASP to dynamically populate pages using data from the database. This means your site is as fast as the server that hosts it, no matter how big the database is. VP-ASP is pretty bare-bones when you get it, but it HAS everything, and more importantly it's open source, so you can make it do anything. The version of VP-ASP I use on our main site is barely recognisable as VP-ASP. It's also a great way to learn the ASP programming language, as by the time you have it the way you want it, you will have been through a bit, but I'm a nerd and I like things like that:)