cube cartI’ve been building websites for along time, and I’ve encountered about every category of website; blog software, CMS systems, etc… . I mostly prefer to hand code sites. One thing I had never ventured into was e-commerce. So when it came to picking shopping cart software, I didn’t have much to go on. I’d heard about oscommerce, so that is where I started. I quickly concluded that while oscommerce was probably stable and probably secure, it seemed that it had not been updated for years. I also read some stories about how much time and effort needs to be done to customize the product. I had also heard a little bit about ZenCart, so I downloaded and setup a demo store to start testing it out. Everything went well, not many problems, the back-end had a ton of options. It didn’t take too long for me to get it setup the way I wanted. After that I started to look at the SEO of ZenCart, it had nothing built in, but there were add-on modules for it. From this research it seemed the SEO worked well, but not great, and that some people were having to install many SEO modules to get the SEO just right. In my mind I am thinking of the many hours that would be spend trying to make ZenCart just right. Not really what I wanted to do.

Hosted cart solutions? I found some pretty nice SEO hosted cart solutions. All of them had big promises, but also pretty big prices. Setup fee’s and monthly charges add a lot of fixed cost to an online store. One of the reasons for an online store is the low cost, low overhead, all that is what makes online shopping competitive. An online shop has no opportunity for people to come in and touch and personally see merchandise, so it has to win on price. Winning on price usually means little to no overhead. Also if you ever have a problem with the hosted cart, or they go bankrupt, you could be left with nothing.

At this point I am beyond a “free” cart solution. Open source is great, but the security of having a paid staff always watching and patching sounds very nice. So now there are many many paid cart software packages. Seems to be 3 levels. $300 and under, $300-$1000, and then from there it seemed the sky was the limit, from $1000 to $5000, sometimes more even. Now if an e-commerce store really takes off, I’d have no problem paying for a high volume cart solution, but I didn’t want to pay that much just to get started with a small online store (less than 1000 products).

CubeCart was reasonable priced at $189. They appear to have paid developers and support staff. An active helpdesk and bug tracking system going on, all good things. So I download a 30 day trial of the software. CubeCart has an easy to use SEO setting that you can turn on in the backend of the system. SEO seems well thought out, and just about every part of the basic SEO process can be set page by page. The URL’s setup was also good, placing category names and product names right into the URL. Perfect. I did choose to go with Cube cart. All my pages (products) were indexed very well within only a few days. Search engine traffic is already coming in from keywords. Now the 2 drawbacks to CubeCart are that the software is encoded, and requires a license key that checks against CubeCart’s servers. The encoding means most the core system php files cannot be seen or changed. This worries me a little for the reasons I didn’t like a hosted cart. If CubeCart closed their doors, would I be left out in the cold with a cart that would stop working? I hope not… but the benefits and price of the CubeCart software out-weighed these fears. So off we go on an e-commerce adventure.

*update* Please read the comments below, a Cube Cart representative has cleared up the encoding details with a promise that if for whatever reason the development stopped, they would open up all the encoded files for their customers. Thank you Al for clearing that up. (Note: I have no reason to think the devleopment would stop, but you just never know.)

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