4 Top Shopping Cart Solutions Reviewed

Some time back I posted about when I chose to create a small shop using Big Cartel instead of going with Etsy. It has become a popular article for the search engines. I thought I would share some more about the online shopping carts available for your business or to offer to your clients.

Etsy - is handmade

If you are making something by hand or selling products used for other crafts or handmade custom goods start with Etsy. The community there is a great starting point for almost all amateur and professional crafters.

The pros of Etsy are the community, especially the handpicked item feature and the search built in that helps shoppers find items regardless of the store. For me the cons are the small fees, they can add up, the lack of flexibility in branding your shop and integrating with your existing site.

Big Cartel

If you aren't selling handmade items then Etsy is not the place for you. They won't even let you in the door. That is where Big Cartel comes in to the conversation. Featured as the 'Simple Store for DIY Rockstars', Big Cartel offers an inexpensive solution to getting a store up and running with little to no technical knowledge needed.

The pricing plans are easy to follow and include a free account. The store and product setup is dead simple, just try it out with the free account. The low cost, even for paid plans, is great for a small business, band or creative artist selling a limited number of items. Finally you can use your own domain name and custom pages with Big Cartel to make your site unique and to match your brand or style.

Big Cartel runs into problems for those businesses selling more than 100 unique products or needing special handling or setup for different product types. For t-shirts the setup works great, but if you have a highly customizable product you might find yourself struggling to setup the options. If you find these to be a problem you will need to move up a level product.

Shopify

Several years back this was the first shopping cart solution I looked into. It was when the Ruby on Rails community was booming. Shopify was built on ruby on rails and the team continues to be actively contributing to some open source projects based on the code from their service.

The pricing plans start where Big Cartel leaves off. Shopify has grown into a great resource for those bigger stores or higher ticket items.  The store allows for everything Big Cartel does plus much more. Integration with shipping and analytics, and a great theme engine. They have even recently released the appstore for Shopify that allows developers to sell their custom plugins that integrate 3rd party apps with the store for shipping, accounting or even affiliate marketing. There is a lot to be seen with Shopify if you are a growing store and don't want to worry about the technical side of hosting a shopping cart.

Spree

If you are finding that the monthly fees or the limits of using a hosted shopping cart are keeping your online store from succeeding there are options such as Spree, an open source e-commerce platform. Spree is a great tool built using some of the payment gateway code from Shopify.

Spree is a flexible tool that can be hosted on your own servers and branded any way you like. There is an active development team and community to offer support. I have contributed some open source extensions to spree community (Wordsmith and heroku).

You can see a Spree Demo here and checkout the showcase of popular spree based sites.

Final Thoughts

Each of the solutions above have strong points but they all depend on your product and business model. Take some time to review the pricing plans and the features offered by each of the big names in online shopping carts before you make a decision about setting up an online shop.

Getting the shop setup is only step one. Step two involves great internet marketing and word of mouth to get those shoppers to your store.  Tonka Park can help you with both steps if you are in need. We can help find the right online shopping cart solution as well as begin your next internet marketing campaign to attract customers to buy your product. Send hello@tonkapark.com an email today.