Other than that this blog will be down for the count tonight while I update the theme – I may try it commando style (without taking it offline) just to spook whoever is reading at the time – it could be good for giggles. Just for good measure I have filled in my down time with WordPress development, some Big Commerce SEO and Core Commerce Development – I also read a book on keyword stuffing

I started on my FAQ to hopefully save you and me sometime when you just want a quick answer – sorry my email replies ahve been a little slow the last 4 weeks – I am back on track now though.

I’m off, just wanted to say hi – I have to spend the afternoon booking 10 days in Sumartra – yeah I deserve it.

• Core Commerce – as of December 31 2009
• Volusion
• 3d Cart – as of Feburary 26 2009
• 1ShoppingCart.com
• Yahoo! Stores – November 30 2009
• Shopify (nothing in the Visa documents yet, but I have verified it)
• Lemonstand can be made PCI compliant easily
• Interspire can be made PCi compliant

Which Shopping Carts are not PCI Compliant?

• Big Commerce – expected to be by the September deadline, but honestly they were expected to be back in June and that didn’t happen – don’t hold  your breathe.

Open source shopping carts and PCI compliance

• ZenCart payment modules are built to PABP compliant assuming no modifications are made to them
• XCart needs significant changes to be made PCI compliant, a default install (storing unmasked Credit cards details) is not and can not be made PCI compliant
• osCommerce as a default installation is not and will not ever be PCI complaint, however it can be made so with significant configuration and payment processor changes.

That being said after 12 months of shopping carts fighting for features we finally have a clear price winner.

Drum-roll please ….

Core Commerce has pushed into the lead by not only striking out the dubious setup fee – they have introduced a newer monthly plan  called beginner that is fully $10 a month cheaper than anyone else. No transaction fees either – so no sneaky get backs to worry about.

Yes you get less for for money but what do you expect. But 100 products and 250Mb is more than enough to get a small retailer off and running.

Hopefully this can bury the issue and you can get back to asking me about important things (like football scores and the secret to eternal youth)

As a web developer or designer we are often asked by customers to recommend a shopping cart or e-commerce solution. Let me  run down the main players and give you the heads up on what to expect.

Magento is good until you have to hand it over to a customer and they ring everyday for 6 months because they can’t work out or remember how to do the simplest thing. That and to get any good features you need to spend over $1200 – that’s a fair chunk of change for what will become a dead weight. There is a free version but Magento themselves are very clear that unless you are a technical genius with technical prowess to rival Google engineers you should avoid it.

Big Commerce is solid and pretty and easy enough to use that your customers will get the hang of it pretty quickly, biggest kicker is that the templates are straight HTML with tokens which means no server side logic at all unless you want to attach it as javascript which gets cumbersome. Your clients will love the features and usability, you just may have to compromise some fancier implementations.

Shopify rocks for templates – so easy and there is even a tool to download to test them so you can do it without causing issue – it is so easy to use in the back end too because there are bugger all features – but that suits a lot of online businesses. Downside? They take a percentage per transaction, pisses most people off, you can tell them to account for it in there pricing but most businesses start getting the shits after a year paying a monthly fee and per transaction fees. If you can talk someone into this it will be the easiest shopping cart template you’ll ever make.

Core Commerce, is like Big Commerce but you can use PHP in the template (not as many individual template files to modify though – but with proper CSS you can get at anything) – the PHP makes it simple to add basic logic so I find them far more powerful than Big Commerce. User admin area is pretty messy though – everything is there and it works just looks like programmers designed it – otherwise, it’s as good as Big Commerce and identical in price. Expect to spend a few more hours helping the customer ease into it that you would with Big Commerce or Shopify though.

Zen Cart – bastard free shopping cart that some people insist on because they think it’s free. It usually costs them more to run because of the templates and administration, but of course the kind of people that want a free cart usually don’t want to pay you to do any work on it – I tend to avoid these jobs now, I got sick of explaining that just because I installed free software did not mean I would work for free. Do the internet a favor, refuse to use osCommerce, Zen Cart or X-Cart

Foxy Cart – nice bolt on cart, similar to Paypal cart but way cooler – it’s a good way to sneak a cart into a static site on the cheap – I am quite fond of it as a solution but it doesn’t suit everyone, worth a look if you have a static site or WordPress install and need a quick cart solution.

WP e-commerce – great solution for small shops on WordPress sites. It is quite powerful and generally well featured (using plugins), needs WordPress to run and comes in free or Gold versions to suit most people. I am a huge fan of WP e-commerce for the right situation but have seen some insane implementations that just leave me wondering. It is always worth a look if you need to add a shop to a blog.

More to come, but to get onto the crappy carts I need more red wine. Don’t forget to Tweet, Digg or Stumble this – I live for the love.

With so many free shopping carts available why should you pay for one? To put it simply, you get what you pay for and most “free” shopping carts cost more in technical support that a service like CoreCommerce. I think Magento (the world’s most complicated ecommerce solution) put it best themselves, when warning you not to use the free edition

… is recommended for expert developers and highly technical enthusiasts and hobbyists in non-mission critical environments. As this edition is unsupported it is intended to be used by those happy to spend time and resource solving issues independently

The only reason to use a free shopping cart i f you are capable of writing one yourself but just don’t have the time. That may sound snobby and elitist – but stop and do the math. BigCommerce and CoreCommerce cost $25 a month. Let’s say on average that a web developer charges $60 an hour – how much help, support and training can you get for $25 a month. Any paid shopping cart will support you at no additional charge, they have complete systems setup (including forums and live chat) to ensure you get the best out of there products.

Yes the free shopping carts have forums and user groups – but neither of these is as useful as picking up the phone and asking for technical support now is it?

Am I anti-open source? Of course not, but I’m a programmer I can deal with open source, I can research solutions, read code, install and configure – I don’t have to pay someone large sums of money to maintain and teach me to use “free” software. Can you?

Is it ever feasible to use a free shopping cart?

No not really. You are just setting yourself up for expensive technical help and headaches. Sure there are rare exceptions, but give me any open source cart and I will convert it to a commercial platform and increase ROI threefold.

So how cheaply can I get into ecommerce?

Using a service like Volusion, CoreCommerce or BigCommerce you can expect to pay approximatley

Setup fee: $50 – shop around occasionally various vendors waive this fee

SSL Security Certificate: $80 – essential to establish trust and for credit card processing

First months fee: $25

Merchant facilities: $20 a month – you need to accept credit cards if you want to succeed

Not out of reach by any stretch $130 dollar in getting setup and $45 a month will have a good looking, professional shopping cart capable of bringing you in a sustainable income.

Thanks to David for triggering this rant.

BP Service Station - You are responsible for oil spills

Let’s call this a Sunday distraction. It came from someone on Twitter but I can’t remember who – if you know give me a ping so I can credit them properly

Changing the look of the store

Managing your store

Product Management

There is no compelling differences except that Volusion is a lot more polished. They both offer a huge number of options but Core Commerce just looks messy. Everything is there but I get the impression that they left it to the programmers to sort out the administration screens at Core Commerce – I love the product but it’s about time they brought in a designer or two to give the product the front-end it deserves.

Features

I won’t carry on too much about features- they change so frequently and are very closely matched that the paragraph would be old and dated before you read it.

SEO

Both need work, but Core Commerce has the edge on Volusion in terms of Search Engine Optimisation features and tools. I won’t bore you with too many details here but URL structure, canonical URL support and URL rewrites put Core Commerce out in front. If you are in a competitive industry and need every bit of search engine love you can muster up – go Core Commerce (or Big Commerce, but that’s another post)

Business Reports

Both are well equipped depending on how you like your reports. Core Commerce comes bundled with a large number of reports, whereas Volusion comes with a great report builder that lets you basically build whatever report you could want.

General Annoyances

Core Commerce in an effort to increase security will automatically log you out of the admin panel after 15 minutes (it does display a warning before hand though) – I understand the theory behind it, but are there really a group of people managing online stores from public computers? This “feature” seems to be for the sake of adding a feature rather than to satisfy any particular need. I am happy to be told I am wrong though.

Matt DeLong from Core Commerce has dropped a comment below to say that this is a requirement of PCI compliance (which means now we have to get annoyed at Big Commerce and Volusion for not having this in) – more importantly you can turn this “feature” off by going to admin > settings > store settings > pci/security

I know it is small and petty (but it does suggest a lack of quality control that concerns me from a shopping cart vendor) is the mis-spelling of Melborene (should be Melbourne) in the timezone lists. Like I said, very minor thing but surprising it has been there so long and not been fixed.

Stability and Longevity

Both products have been around for years and are working actively with there respective communities – there is no way to split them based on how long they have been operating and how long we can expect them to be operating, you are safe as houses whichever one you choose.

The Verdict

• Need a custom design created? Core Commerce
• In a competitive industry? Core Commerce
• Complex Products and Product Variations? Volusion
• Preference for easy to use, good looking programs? Volusion
• Want iPhone/Mobile Phone support? Core Commerce
• Want value for money? Core Commerce
• Want the simplest choice? Core Commerce
• Want powerful business reporting? Volusion

I don’t think you would have too many issues whichever shopping cart you choose, if you would like more help or a more complete and personal consultation feel free to contact me.

No logic in the templates

This one hurts the most – and is the one that probably won’t change because of the massive amount of work it would take.

It means you can’t do things like hide out of stock products easily (you can use javascript in some circumstances but it is just more money you need to spend isn’t it?). With the pending introduction of pre-ordering this might not be an issue with most businesses, but there are a lot out there that wish that the products would vanish when they were sold out.

It means you can’t create special conditions in templates by saying:

If this is the third product in the product grid insert this text

or

If this menu item is the one for the Blog make it green

There are unreliable ways to do some things using CSS, javascript and cheap* hacks inside the template files – but it really is much harder than it should be.

Shopify has exceptional support for all sorts of fabulous logic and template control – if you really need it look into it – be warned they charge you per transaction as well as per month – but for some people looking perfect is more important that the few extra dollars it costs.

Limited Email Signup Options

Basically you can only have two email lists. One general and one for people who have purchased and sometimes this isn’t enough. You also can’t add extra fields to the signup process. Don’t let this put you off just yet, there are plans to integrate with Mail Chimp which could be a game changer. Regardless a decent developer will be able to use some custom code and funky javascript to allow you to have any signup form you can imagine.

You can’t upload PDF’s to attach to pages within Big Commerce

I know right? I guess it never occurred to them, or they just plain forgot it. I can’t remember the last job I was on that a customer didn’t want to upload a PDF (usually a brochure or product spec sheet) and link to it from a page (or product page). There are ways around it obviously but you need to be able to FTP amongst other things and very few clients want to deal with that.

As an aside (and a free money saving tip) – if you do have to send PDF’s to a web person to upload for you, save yourself some money by naming the files properly and sending them all in one hit. To name the files properly, remove all the spaces in the file name (make them dashes if need be), take out the capital letters and make sure the spelling is correct.

Variations can be a lot of work

I won’t waffle on too much there are plenty of other nutters talking nonsense about the problems with Big Commerce Variations. In short, once you set them up and assign inventory quantities to them, you can’t change them without having to go back and re-enter all the inventory amounts again. There are some tricks to use to stop this from happening, there are techniques that can be employed to help you manage these issues, but the bottom line is if you have a lot of products with an ever changing list of variations you might want to look at something like Core Commerce.

I am not going to bash the Variations in Big Commerce, because I understand the programming behind them and I realise that they are made to be a generic solution that works for most of the people, most of the time. Evaluate the product, look into it’s limitations and then move forward one way or another.

So why all the bad press with Big Commerce variations? In my humble opinion it stems from two camps:

1. Those people who’s requirements are such that they should have gone with a custom solution, but didn’t because they went with the cheaper option.
2. Those people that didn’t make use of the free trial to ensure the product they were committing there success to was a good fit.

Are Big Commerce‘s problem’s really that bad?

Not such a big list after all, and apart from variations hardly a show stopper when you look at the cost of the product. I touched on this in the variations rant, Big Commerce is a relatively cheap product (compare it to Magento or a custom solution for instance). You can not reasonably expect to get your way 100% of the time when you buy an off the shelf product – and you need to weigh up the pro’s and con’s before committing. They offer a free trial, they are easy enough to contact, there is a large enough community that you can make inquiries around the internet – there is no real reason to be taken by surprise if something you “must have” isn’t possible in one shopping cart or another. If it is that critical consider spending a few dollars and get a Big Commerce Consultant to talk to you for an hour or two before you dive in.

* Cheap as in cheap and nasty, no cheap as in $10 – sorry to get your hopes up.

At the time of writing (May 2010) Big Commerce is not PCI-DSS compliant, but is well on it’s way, and will be by the time it is required (July 2010). Back in Feburary 2010 big Commerce said they “have finished all of the technical modifications and are finishing up our documentation before our final audit”. An announcement that Big Commerce is PCI-DSS compliant is imminent

Is Big Commerce PA-DSS Compliant?

As at May 2010, Big Commerce does not need PA-DSS compliance.

Back Story:

I am developing a little Rails Application and need to update Ruby Gems to deploy the app to Media Temple. No such luck – I did what i knew to do to upgrade and kept getting the following error “Expected Ruby version >= 1.8.6, is 1.8.5″

I Googled a lot but couldn’t find anyway to upgrade Ruby so after a few head bashes I contacted support and waited for the reply.

Unfortunately, the latest version of the Ruby Gems requires at least version 1.8.6 to run the updater and your container is currently running 1.8.5. Until our engineers are able to upgrade to core version of Ruby running within the containers you will be unable to update your Gem versions. Due to the shared nature of the (gs) Grid-Service we would be unable to upgrade the version running within your individual container, as the upgrade would affect all customers across the (gs) Grid-Service with Ruby containers. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Bit of a bummer, who knows how long that could take. Long story short, if you need a newer version of Ruby and you are hosted at Media Temple get a DV not the Grid Service. It is only $10 month more anyway (by the time you pay for the Grid service and the Rails Container) and more usefully, you get full root access.