Shopping Cart for Laser Engraved Products

[Ed Newbold]

Does anyone have any knowledge of, or experience with, this free shopping cart service: http://www.mals-e.com/

I've been beating the bushes trying to find an economical solution to this shopping cart problem so I can market my engraved plaques, pens, frames, etc., on the internet.

Any ideas?

Thanks very much.

[Mike Null]

Ed
Can't be of much help but I know that Yahoo has a service along with good tech support.

[Craig Hogarth]

Godaddy has a pretty good one under $10 monthly. Although it says only 20 products (for that fee), you can actually get more since it allows you to have price adjustments for various options. For example, you can just have one plaque for $20. If they want 8x10, it adds $5 and if they want a shield shape, it adds $2.

[Neal Schlee]

Ed,

We use Roman Cart for one of our websites. It sounds similair to Mals-E. If you want to accept CC's you'll need a merchant account otherwise you'll only be able to accept payment via checks and snail mail.
Roman Cart has plans from $89 a YEAR to $369 a year depending on the extras you need. RC is very easy to integtrate into any web page and their support is second to none. It can easily be upgraded at anytme.

Neal

[Mike Hood]

I use Zen Cart and Authorize.net as my gateway. Probably costs me $45/mo in fees and the rest, but the convenience of taking your own MC/Visa/AMX can't be beat.

Your own domain and carts are the only way to go in my book. If they pay for themselves, there's nothing easier and seeing the deposits hit every evening is pretty nice as well.

[Peter Zacarelli]

I have helped many with shopping carts over the years. Help designed them, hosted them, serviced, debugged and maintained them. There is the sort of free way using products like OSCommerce, Zencart, etc. These are very good products but the problem with them is that you start spending more time working with the shopping carts then with your own business. The shopping cart is supose to be a tool for your business and not take away all your time from your business. I guess you can go with their generic carts and not modifiy them much they are not so bad, but it has been my experience that they do have lots of bugs that have to be fixed. This requires hours and hours of reading on the internet in their forums for fixes and so fourth. The learning curve could be must worst for some then learning to laser!

After all the carts that I have worked with for myself and others I would just recommend that you go with somthing like Volusion -www.volusion.com-.
In my opinion they have the best software/hardware combo for the money.
Hosting is included. Depending how many products (items) you want to list is how you are priced. You could list 20 products for about $30 a month, 200 for about $50.00). The have good customer service, offer a discounted gateway for MC/VISA. Also, and this is very important, the way their system works (i.e. all items for sale have key words for searching as the address name rather then some cat number that is meaningless) it helps getting listing hight in the search engines.

Another cart to consider is PDshop -www.pagedowntech.com-. It's software that you purchase then have hosted. It's good software, easy to learn, haven't come accoss any bugs in it.

For hosting, again I have been thru them all, I even sell GoDaddy hosting myself but I personally use ixwebhosting -www.ixwebhosting.com-. The problems you can get with hosting a shopping cart are enormous. People hyjacking your site, using you email system for spanning the world getting your email black listed, your site closed now. Again, one must be careful!

There is alot to explain about hosting and shopping carts, how they work, what to avoid, how to get better listings, etc. You could spend alot of time supporting some carts, too much time if you go with the wrong cart and or hosting company.

If you have questions or what to chat more then PM me. I will be glad to help you with your questions as best that I can.

[Ed Newbold]

I would just recommend that you go with somthing like Volusion -www.volusion.com.They look good from the outside, but their monthly fees are more than I care to pay. Plus, they charge a $99 set up fee, and when I see a 'setup fee' for something that I'm doing 99% of the work on, I get mad.



Another cart to consider is PDshop -www.pagedowntech.com.This is a nice looking package and is very affordable, but is ASP only. I need JSP or PHP, since my sites are hosted on Unix/Linux servers only.

I'm still open to suggestions though. Mal's is still looking like a pretty good way to go.

Thanks,

[Mike Hood]

I'm not seeing whats so hard about Zen Cart. Other than personalization, its a matter of adding categories, setting up your payment gateways and adding products. Mine runs just fine and has given me no grief. I like the look / feel better than OSCommerce, but I've used it as well.

[Peter Zacarelli]

My point was that if you use the plain vanilla package then it may not be so hard for most people. Then again I know people who can’t even set their digital clocks at home without help. You and I might not have problems but others have many, just check out the shopping cart forums. When you want to customize to get a unique look and feeling is when things could get even more tricky for some. Depending on what kind of presence you want on the internet you may want to customize your shop just so it doesn’t look like the thousands of others online. And if you listen to the supposed experts, setting up a shop online is more then just listing products in categories or choosing border and font colors. And I agree that there are a lot of factors to consider with an e-shop. I can guarantee that there are a lot more forums with a lot more people talking about what to do and not do with their shopping carts, about their shopping cart problems, why this and that doesn’t work and all their other problems than we could ever have in our wood working, engraving, signs, rewards and recognition communities. There are bugs in most “Free” packages, most users do not notice them but they are there. Because there are so many creeps out there looking to hack, steal, damage, destroy sites online you have to be careful of security issues that most free carts have. Countless e-shops and other sites have been hijacked, stealing information, using them to put out span, etc. The security issues must be fixed and other areas have to be hardened. Either you read up on these issues and fix them yourself or you must hire someone to maintain your e-shop for you. Anyone could set up a shopping cart but to set up a successful e-shop is another story. That’s why there are lots of companies charging the big bucks to do it, some legit and some not so legit. So heads up, choose wisely. Most of us laser users would not choose a cheep Chinese laser (you know the two month life water cooled tube type) over our much more expensive Universal, Epilog, Explorer, etc. and the like machines because most of us want the least amount of problems. We want to deal with our engraving businesses and not the idiosyncrasies of the machine. However there are users right here on this forum that have braved these other machines and quite successfully I might add. They have save tons of money doing so and are very happy with their machines. They produce work just as well as everyone else does. So the bottom line is that it’s all about the individual’s level of knowledge, commitment and most importantly, time that one has to take on with any endeavor whether in life or business. Uunfortunately not everyone has the same levels.

[Ed Newbold]

I'm not seeing whats so hard about Zen Cart. Other than personalization, its a matter of adding categories, setting up your payment gateways and adding products. Mine runs just fine and has given me no grief. I like the look / feel better than OSCommerce, but I've used it as well.Thanks for the info. I've just downloaded ZEN Cart to see what it's like. I love PHP, but I always thought the ZEN things required a special ZEN add-in, or a special ZEN development environment. I'll check it out.

Any advice or gotchas you know of with this cart?

Thanks,

[Peter Zacarelli]

Ed, I do not think that Zen cart requires that you purchase anything additional. It's a nice cart. The only thing you will have to purchase is a SSL certificate if you want to accept Visa/MC/etc. (don't need one for PayPal) and of course some type of hosting.

Peter

[Bob Cole]

You don't need to purchase anything with ZenCart. If you setup your account with Paypal it is only a per transaction fee. The percentage may be higher than you can get with a traditional credit card machine, but you only pay for each transaction no monthly. Good to start out this way then move up if cost justifies.

You can also download mysql. Free database system.

[Dave Jones]

Ed I suspect you are thinking about "Zend". The open source Zend Engine and commercial product Zend Platform are both add ons to PHP. One free, one not. Neither is related to the Zen shopping cart.

[Ed Newbold]

Ed I suspect you are thinking about "Zend". The open source Zend Engine and commercial product Zend Platform are both add ons to PHP. One free, one not. Neither is related to the Zen shopping cart.Thanks for the clarification, Dave. You're right that I was thinking Zend was related to ZenCart. Glad that's cleared up.

[Mike Hood]

Thanks for the info.

Any advice or gotchas you know of with this cart?

Thanks,

Not really. You can have it out of the box and running in a few hours. Even in it's plain vanilla skin, its more than functional. So much so, I've spent more time worrying about product and less about appearances.

I really like the interface and the feature set. Coupons and gift certificates are really neat. I often send those out to folks for small items. They pick up the shipping and I can get samples out at no cost that way.

Good cart in my opinion. Definitely need a SSl cert though. Most companies demand it, and most consumers expect it nowadays.