Are you running a Joomla powered website? Have you always thought it would be nice to be able to sell products on your site with the use of a shopping cart plugin or extension? There are several popular Joomla shopping carts available for you to download and add to your database. Most come with complete instructions on how to add products and set up your payment processor so you can be on your way to making money in no time.

The following is a list of 5 popular Joomla shopping carts that can be added to your site as a plug in or extension. Knowing the features and benefits of how each one can help you grow your business will help you choose the best option for your site.

Virtue Mart

This is a full featured (and very popular) shopping cart that can be run either as in catalog mode or store mode. If you are thinking of selling numerous products this is a good choice due to the powerful administration tools that allows for an unlimited number of categories, products, discounts, orders, customers and shoppers groups, There are also 150 extensions that can be added to this software for even more features.

RokQuickCart

This is a simple shopping cart that is easily integrated into Joomla. While it may be quick to set up, it is still full features including the ability to showcase your products with photos, descriptions, and additional options. You can set it up to sell your items with PayPal or Google checkout, and it supports customized shipping properties.

Seber Cart

Much like the Rok cart, this is a simple platform made to look like a custom solution that is part of the sites original template rather than a cheap add on. It supports PayPal as well as Moneybrokers payment processors. The features are limited with the free version, the fully loaded option can be purchased for $99.

jStore

While not a free option, the benefits and features are well worth the €95 license fee. Many store owners have a hard time trying to optimize their sites for SEO and getting ranked well on the search engines, jStore has great SEO support out of the box. You only need to set it up and add your products and the store practically does the selling for you. There is a free trial so you can check it out for yourself. They also make another solution called jMarket.

Clickcart Pro or Europa Cart

Two more commercial options that have some great features. There are two levels you can purchase. The full version is $199.00 and the upgrade is $99.00, a once only cost. It is flexible, you can accept payments easily, you can ship anywhere in the world, it integrates with your accounting software and is fully search engine optimized. There is video help and free support at any time you need it. Created and sold by kryptonic.com.

There are many Joomla shopping carts available on the internet today both as free versions and paid. You may want to try a few out and test them to see which one really works the best for you. You may like the layout or themes in some more so than others. The only true way you can make a decision is to give it a shot yourself.



Categories: Shopping Carts | Date: Sep 19th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 2 Comments

One of the challenges that some ecommerce merchants have, particular those who sell digital goods, is recurring subscriptions. If you have a very simple $X/month model with a small number of people then the PayPal recurring subscriptions is probably good enough.

Early Impact, makers of ProductCart, just release SubscriptionBridge, a service designed to provide a more enterprise friendly subscription service. The differences between this and PayPal are numerous. One key one is the ability to not use PayPal! It supports Authorize.net as the payment gateway. It has hooks into Magento and of course ProductCart with more to come. Worth checking out if you need to handl recurring payments in a scaleable way.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 13th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

I got an email from Craig at Pinnacle Cart about their new “Drift Marketing” feature in Pinnacle Cart 3.7.5. While I’m familiar with the concept, I have to admit the term drift marketing is a new one to me.

The concept is that if a customer gets part way through the checkout purchase and abandons, drift marketing allows you to target them in various ways to encourage them to complete the purchase. In the words of Pinnacle:

(Drift Marketing) Provides incentives to customers who abandon their checkout process at selected time intervals. This system is designed to remarket to customers who become distracted or leave your store with items in their cart. Set up as many campaigns as you want and get your customers to return to the store and complete their order.

This feature, if setup well, will almost certainly increase your conversion rate, putting money straight to your bottom line. There’s a few other nice features in the latest version as well, but this was the standout for me. Check out the newest version of Pinnacle Cart.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 8th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment