Introduction
ProductCart is an ASP shopping cart made by Early Impact. I've had dealings
with Early Impact and have been impressed with their professionalism. A while
ago I
interviewed Massimo Arrigoni, the CEO of Early Impact. You can
read
his thoughts on ecommerce. They do two main products. Product Cart is a
"standard" shopping cart, and Product Cart Build to Order for
customisable products. They also sell several add ons for Product Cart. This
review looks at Product Cart with the "Apparel Add-on", an add on designed for
selling variations on a product, eg, multiple sizes and/or colors as commonly
found in the apparel industry.
Installation
Installation was relatively straight forward. There are two database options,
Microsoft Access or SQL Server. I chose Microsoft SQL Server which has a
slightly more complex setup, for anyone familiar with SQL Server it's nothing
unusual. Overall, the setup was pretty straight forward. Complete
technophobes may struggle with it, but anyone who knows how to FTP a file
should be ok. Using Microsoft access as a database definitely simplifies
things.
As I am using the Apparel Add-on I had to install that after I'd setup
ProductCart, that install was very simple.
Initial impressions
The first thing I did was explore the administration interface. The interface
is simply and intuitive. I spent a while thinking "I wonder how it handles X",
most of the time I could find how to manage that function within seconds. It's
not the prettiest administration interface I've seen but it's simple,
uncluttered and easy to use.
The administration homepage contains sensible links that you are likely to use
regularly such as find a product, find an order, or look at recent sales.
General setup such as changing the shop name, preferred currency, etc, are
easy to do.
Setting up and managing products
The first step is to create some products. The product interface
is simple but offers comprehensive features such as list, wholesale and
cost prices, back order of products, ability to have products not for sale,
etc. It's this degree of sophistication that impressed me about ProductCart.
Context sensitive help is offered throughout. Bulk import and export of
products is supported.
Payment, shipping and taxes
It's not the sexiest subject, but this can make or break for a shopping
cart. There is a comprehensive collection of supported payment gateways, and
many non-credit card options. I set up a payment gateway and an offline
payment method easily in 5 minutes. Shipping is straight forward, and I found
the handling of taxes especially easy to use.
Checking out
The checkout process is critical - mistakes at this stage cost sales. How does
ProductCart stack up? It's not the shortest process, but the importance of few
steps is often over rated. The emphasis should be on clear, easy to understand
steps and ProductCart does this will. Each step is simple, it is clear where
you're at in the process, and a good summary page. One nice feature is the
ability to purchase without having to register, this has been implemented
cleverly.
One thing I didn't like about the checkout is that it uses the same template
as the rest of the shop. You should remove all distractions during the
checkout process. Why do you still want to show links to your best selling
products when a customer is about to buy? I'm sure this could be modified but
it's a pity it's not done by default.
Skinning
ProductCart has a 16 page PDF manual called "Integrating product cart v3 with
your web site". I was disappointed to find that the default skin doesn't use
valid W3C code. It would be possible to make it W3C compliant, but the effort
would be significant.
There is an extension available for Dreamweaver which will apparently add the
appropriate ProductCart code to your Dreamweaver page. As this extension isn't
available for ProductCart v3 at time of writing I didn't test it. It promises
to make the skinning process very simple.
Anyone with a decent knowledge of HTML should be able to make a template
easily enough. A basic knowledge of ASP would be helpful but not
essential. This gallery of live ProductCart stores gives an idea of the skinning capabilities.
Marketing tools
Marketing tools is an area where ProductCart does well. There is a real
depth and maturity in many of the tools, and usability is
good.
Product features
Creating multiple images per product with thumbnail, detailed views, etc, is
straight forward. It's also easy to configure the homepage with specials,
featured items and top sellers.
Discounts
There is a lot of flexibility in creating discount coupons. Fixed price
discounts, percentage off and free shipping are all supported. Standard
features like number of uses per coupon and expiry date also work. It also
supports limiting the coupons in a range of useful ways - minimum amount,
restricted to certain products and categories, etc. This allows sophisticated
promotions such as "20% off all orders over $50 of brand X during
November".
Emails
The newsletter wizard has some of the nicest features I've seen, allowing you
to send out targeted emails. For example, you can send to customers who have
purchased a particular type of product or to customers who purchased during a
certain time frame (a great way to remind old customers of your store).
Support for newsletter templates would be nice, as well as a way to
automatically add products to a newsletter - almost all newsletters will have featured
products and creating these by hand can be time consuming.
Search engines
ProductCart doesn't use what many people would call "Search Engine Friendly
URLs". A typical product cart URL looks like:
http://www.yourstore.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=&idproduct=231
Where a search engine friendly URL would be:
http://www.yourstore.com/productcart/pc/yourcategory-yourproductname.html
It's generally accepted in the search engine optimization community
that these types of URLs are acceptable to all major search engines and so
shouldn't be a problem. Some statistics packages do have troubles reporting on
query string based URLs so your mileage may vary. It does support automatic
sitemap creation as well as Google sitemap creation and submission, a feature
which makes it easier for Google to crawl your site.
Other marketing tools
ProductCart includes a comprehensive set of other marketing tools. Amongst
these are:
-
Gift certificates
-
Quantity discounts
-
A reward points program
-
Wish lists
-
Affiliates programs
-
Export to Google Base (formerly Froogle)
-
Gift wrapping
-
Gift certificates
Reporting
ProductCart has a respectable range of reports. The sales reports are very
thorough, allowing you to view sales reports by multiple methods such as by
date, product, payment type, top products, etc. This should be a real boost to
the savvy marketer to support a range of business decisions.
There's a range of other basic reports such as orders and customers. One nice
report is a drop off report which should help increase conversions. I
would have liked to have seen a search report, showing what terms are searched
for using the ProductCart search engine.
Extensibility
There is no formal plug-in architecture, no way for end users to write
plug-ins.
ProductCart is written using ASP with VBScript, and all source code is
included. The code is clean and well documented, I found it very easy to
follow. I wanted to make a minor change to the image uploading functionality
and managed to follow the code easily and make the change quickly. There seem
to be no third party add ons. Having said that, the software is quite complete
and so there is little need outside of very business specific add ons. Early
Impact do make several commercial add ons available for people with specialised
needs.
Support
I had to deal with support on two occasions. They have a comprehensive
manual, and easy to use knowledge base and a customer forums which gets a
little traffic. The link to raise a ticket wasn't buried 5 pages deep as with
some sites, and was easy to use. Once submitted, it promised a reply within 1
business day. I got the reply within 24 hours which is particularly impressive
as I raised the ticket on Saturday. On Sunday evening we had several emails
back and forth and resolved the issue. The support was a breath of fresh air -
fast, courteous, no annoying canned answers, and support staff who clearly
understood what they were talking about, asked sensible questions and offered
reasonable solutions. The problem turned out to be a configuration issue on my
web host and not a problem with ProductCart, but they didn't leap straight to
the "blame the other guy" as many support teams do, that conclusion was only
reached after a thorough investigation of possible ProductCart issues.
Other features
There are lots of little features that while in themselves are not earth
shattering are nice to have. These include:
- Gift wrapping
- Gift registries
- Customer helpdesk
- Drop ship support
- Quantity discounts
- Good wholesaler support
- Customisable customer fields
And many others. Most of them you probably won't use, but there'll probably be
one or two that will be a life saver for you.
Conclusion
ProductCart is an excellent product which is showing it's maturity as a
version 3 product. It has a lot of attention to detail and small features
which are missing from most other products which are a breath of fresh air to
many shop owners. While there is certainly room for improvement, the strong
existing features and excellent support make this a cart that belongs on most
people's short list.