Ashop Commerce has been around for about a decade, has Australian roots and is priced competitively so it seemed like a great shopping cart for the “I hate BigCommerce” crowd.

Ashop Commerce features

• Comprehensive SEO features and tools
• B2B Wholesale Support
• Supports Australia Post, FedEx, UPS, USPS
• Supports al major payment processors including Paypal and Google Checkout.
• Large collection of beautiful free themes see Ashop Commerce Templates
• Built in newsletter system
• Built in affiliate program
• Built in customer support tickets
• Digital Product delivery – including product key management
• Language Editor to translate your entire store
• Coming next month eDay integration to sell old stock on eBay automatically.

Whats missing from Ashop Commerce?

• Daily Deals
• Mail Chimp. Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor Integration
• Product Bundling
• Amazon Integration

Things I like about Ashop Commerce

Proper Wholesale customer support. Want to show wholesale customers one set of prices and everyone else another? Tick one box and you can – finally someone made it easy.

Support. They have enough support resources for their client base and offer multiple ways to get issues resolved fast. I got a phone call after 7pm on a Friday night – what more could you want?

Export your database as a database. Perfect for people that want to run their own reports and tools.

Unlimited bandwidth. Nothing confuses people more than plans with bandwidth limitations. It causes uncertainty and is a non-issue for 99% of shopping cart owners anyway.

Fair Price Structure. You can start from $16.95/month with $0 setup. If you want more features pay more. They call it MSaaS (Modular Software as a Service) – you will call it paying for only what you use – I know alot of people that will switch to Ashop just because of this.

Very clean interface, very easy to see most details and very easy to customise to suit. It looks and feels like a standard desktop application and recent changes have improved speed to the point it that it runs like one too.

The Australia version has Australian defaults. The USA version has USA defaults. I know this sounds like a very small details but it is attention to detail like this that makes using a shoping cart every day easier and more intuitive.

Things I would change if I could

I can not set a custom page title for product pages – I have some control, but I love SEO so I want more. Greedy? Yes probably but in a competitive market you need to be.

Images do not automatically resize to suit the design, you need to do this as an extra step. For some people this would be a bonus though so don’t necessarily put this in the con column.

The trial is only 10 days – it is full featured which is more than other carts but 10 days is a little short if you need more than one person to play with the cart and give it a proper evaluation.

The content area of the website is table based. This means very little to most business people but it makes it harder to apply fine detail level design changes. Not a show stopper, but hopefully they start cleaning it up during 2012.

Ashop Commerce Screenshots

Would I recommend Ashop Commerce?

Yes. Look for a complete review and a comparison between BigCommerce and Ashop Commerce in February but for the time being I would happy recommend Ashop Commerce. If it meets your requirements you will have a great time with this software, as always give the free trial a spin and see how good it is firsthand.

I know several designer’s that will not be very impressed with the high quality of these themes – check back in a day or so to find out if Ashop is the best shopping cart for you but from the look around I have had this evening it looks like a solid product and I am really enjoying it – if you are looking for a simple to use ecommerce platform add it to your short list.

From now until the end of March 2012 you can use the code PCNOSETUP to sign up for Pinnacle Cart without the $49 setup fee.

New features in Pinnacle Cart 3.7.0 include:

• Quick 8 step setup guide, ideal for ecommerce newbies
• More free templates
• Better photo galleries
• Full URL customisation (perfect if you are moving to Pinnacle Cart from another platform)
• Product Reviews and Testimonials
• Unlimited Drop Shipping Locations
• Support for UPC and SKU numbers
• Amazon Payments and QuickBooks Merchant Services
• Site profit reports
• Brand landing pages

Want to know more read this Pinnacle Cart Review or head over to Which Cart? to get more personalised help.

Here are the freely available themes that you can use, or you can contact me or any of the designers listed on this site for a free quote to build you a custom ecommerce theme.

I expect there will be issues with the PHP templating system they use, as CoreCommerce found out in August 2011, but they are smart cookies so I am confident they will have a solution.

My biggest complaint about LemonStand has always been that small businesses need to buy sme pretty expensive web hosting to make it run at full speed, but with a hosted solution based around Firehost and the Akamai CDN that will no longer be an issue.

At the moment the software is in closed beta, but you can be sure as soon as I get to see it I will let you know how it goes. There is no word on pricing or what will happen with LemonStand licensed but if the lessons of magento Community Edition and Interspire are anything to go by once a company moves to a hosted version they slowly but surely either kill off the licenced product or let it die of negligence – lets hope not they were making a great product.

Hosted Shopping Cart Software

BigCommerce – Full featured. Safe bet, support is questionable luckily you will probably never need it. You could go straight to BigCommerce and never regret it. Read a full BigCommerce Review

Shopify – Looks good. Costs more than it should and every new feature costs a little bit more, but it looks great and is very easy to use. Start here and move to BigCommerce if it doesn’t fit. Read a full Shopify Review

CoreCommerce – cheaper than BigCommerce almost identical otherwise. You will be happy with CoreCommerce if you choose it, they are always improving it. Read a full CoreCommerce Review

AShop - Great features, only pay for what you use pricing structure to keep costs down, lots of beautiful free themes and great support. Also includes an Australian version that is ideal for Australian ecommerce stores. Read my Ashop Commerce Review

Fortune3 – it’s getting there. Expect a few bugs if you jump on board now. Otherwise wait unti the end of 2012 it should be ready for the big to time then.

Pinnacle Cart – Very easy to use. Has more than enough features. Has the best marketing and re-marketing tools of any cart available. Read a full Pinnacle Cart Review

3dCart – 3dCart is a great cart, I wish more people would consider it. It looks good. Runs great and the people behind are awesome. Read a full 3dCart Review

BigCartel – Worth a look. Ideal for setting up your indie T-shirt or music website. Super software done right. Not very good for shops dealing in volume or large traffic. Read a full BigCartel Review

Americommerce – Great. Has every feature yo could ever want built right into it. Takes a little learning because of it’s size but it works and support is excellent. Read a full Americommerce Review

Volusion – if you have to use it it is fine, it should never be your first choice. Very difficult to learn, expensive to make it look good.

Magento Go – worse than Magento – more restrictive, no ready way to move to another provider when you realise how bad it really is and you can’t access the code to make the necessary changes to make the shop actually run and generate sales.

Highwire – A commendable effort. Priced appropriately. Worse shopping carts out there. I like what I have seen so far.

Vendio – not impressed. Too expensive for the little love it will give you. They need to bring there pricing down to comparable carts like Highwire and BigCartel.

Licensed Shopping Cart Software

Cube Cart – No, don’t bother. Try CS Cart or Interspire. The have tried to do too much and you are left feeling like they didn’t do any of it well.

CS Cart – Always happy to use and work with CS Cart. It just goes about it’s business quietly. Give it a shake you won’t be sorry.

Interspire – Brilliant but it has a questionable future, I wouldn’t be relying on it. If you have some developers handy it is worth a look but Interspire became BigCommerce and they have basically left Interspire and all the customers standing outside in the rain. the software is good but it probably won’t get new features or support past 2012.

Lemonstand – Has everything in place to be a real contender. Runs slow on most web servers and the documentation is poor. Give it 2 more releases and it will shine. Definitely keep an eye on it or adopt it now and be brave.

Magento – more difficult than brain surgery, Uglier than a bag of smashed crabs. Do not use. Never. You have been warned.

KonaKart – If you need a Java Shopping Cart go with KonaKart. It does everything you could want. Pricing model is a bit weird. Free or $5,000 but the software is solid.

X-Cart - does this even still exist? Lets hope not. It did a great job back in the day before we knew how to properly design shopping cart software and seperate business and presentation logic. Pass. The support is non-existant anyway if you bought a copy you would be on your own.

ASP(.NET) Shopping Carts

AspDotNetStorefront – a monster of a product. Lots of nice features but you will pay for them. If you have the cash go for it it is leading the way

Free Shopping Carts

OpenCart – once you get it set up Open cart rocks and the price is right. A few very minor hidden costs for some features but gaining momentum, shold be the premier open source shopping cart in 2 years.

Prestashop – Not as good as OpenCart but a close second. Has a strong community so it will continue to improve and grow. If you chose to use it you would be in safe hands.

osCommerce – Have you seen old screenshots of Internet Explorer 4 – remember when it came out and it was cool but now  you look at it and laugh and remember the good old days and Melrose Place and what not. osCommerce is the Internet Explorer 3 of shopping carts. Technically it might still work but it will be the worst online experience of your life. Please think of the children, don’t even visit the site it just encourages them.

ZenCart – ZenCart is worse than osCommerce. ZenCart is like osCommerce but with crazy clown paint on. I can’t explain why but every ZenCart website looks like it was built by a colour blind alpaca. It isn’t the designer’s fault – there is just something that happens when ZenCart renders a webpage that makes jesus cry and customers flee screaming.

WordPress Shopping Carts

WP e-commerce – your best best. Go for the $40 option ans get all the bells and whistle’s. Strong developer community so you can always get help.

Shopp – It’ll do, I don’t much fancy it but it isn’t the worst thing you will ever do.

Jigoshop – Run. If your developer suggests this sack them and then beat them. They sack them again so they get the point.

Drupal Shopping Carts

Ubercart – If you have to use Drupal and you have to integrate a shopping cart this is the best option. It is still like doing dental work on yourself though.

Joomla Shopping Carts

VirtueMart – The only joomla shopping cart worth thinking about. You need to question why you are using Joomla in the first place. Like wordpress carts you should move the store onto a subdomain and use dedictaed shopping cart software.

Hikashop – They tried to make a very simple flexible shopping cart. They did. Then they added “marketing tools” and now it is junk. Don’t even download it and take a look you will abuse me for making you waste your time.

Need more help choosing a shopping cart?

Try WhichCart.com to get expert one on one help picking the right e-commerce solution for your needs.

CoreCommerce

Almost identical, occasionally cheaper. CoreCommerce supports 99% of BigCommerce features, payment gateways and shopping methods. It also has one of the best product import processes and tool suite sof any hosted shopping cart. You should have no problem moving from BigCommerce to CoreCommerce.

CoreCommerce is the best alternative for people outside the United States and Canada (or inside the USA and Canada) because of the wide variety of shipping and payment providers it supports.

Read my CoreCommerce Review or BigCommerce vs CoreCommerce

Americommerce

Americommerce supports all the same features as BigCommerce and adds several new ones including multistore capabilities, email newsletter management and built in affiliate program. You could easy save money by moving to Americommerce from BigCommerce and the support staff are happy to help you organise the product import.

Read my AmeriCommerce Review

Pinnacle Cart

A great alternative to BigCommerce for Americans and Canadians, a very good cart but it only supports FedEx, UPS, USPS and Canada Post for shipping so the rest of the world might struggle to make it work. It supports all other BigCommerce features and adds some wonderful marketing, direct marketing and re-marketing tools as well.

Read the Pinnacle Cart Review I wrote for Shopping Carts Reviewed

3dCart

Very underated. 3dCart is a great alternative to BigCommerce. If you are not in North America you will have trouble finding a compatible shipping provider because 3dCart only supports UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL and Canada Post. Otherwise the only missing feature is Wish lists.

Read my 3dCart Review

Shopify

You can add the necessary features to Shopify from the Shopify AppStore to make it generally compatible with BigCommerce. The only limitation would that it will end up costing you more, add to that the 2% per transaction fee Shopify add to your monthly bill and the costs increase again.

Read my Shopify Review or Shopify vs BigCommerce

Prepare to spend a little more than other carts to use Shopify. That will probably be your only complaint though. It is the designer and developers choice of shopping cart software because of how easy it is to customise and how simple it is to  train end users.

While it does not have the feature set of the other major carts by default most every piece of functionality can be added (sometimes at a small cost) from the Shopify AppStore. There are many free Shopify themes to help you minimise the upfront costs but given how wonderful it is to work with you can feel confident letting your imagination go wild, everything is possible with Shopify.

The bullet points

PRO Super simple to use and manage. No bloated features. Very clean, very attractive screens [insert image]
PRO Some very beautiful free themes.Better than the premium themes of most shopping carts
CON A small per transaction fee that can build up quickly on busy carts
CON No newsletter support or integration, although there is a MailChimp app in the app store that allows you to connect your store to your MailChimp lists.
CON SEO doesn’t exist, to get META tags (keywords and descriptions) you need to pay an extra $6 a month in the AppStore. There is integration with Google Product Search and Google Website Optimizer. No rich snippet support but you can find a tutorial and code snippet here.
PRO Very well organized backend that makes it simple to see how you store is performing and what needs your attention.

What does Shopify do better than every other cart?

It is very easy to use, looks great and let’s you get on with the business of selling and fulfilling orders. If you just want to sell online this could be your best option.
It is the most visually customizable shopping cart on the market. There is nothing you can not make a Shopify theme look like. There are no visual restrictions or generated markup and code to deal with, the liquid template engine is a developer and designers dream.

What is the downside of using Shopify?

Out of the box it does the bare minimum. No gift certifictaes, no wish list, no SEO. Probably not a downside if you just want to sell products and make money. Almost every feaure you could possible need is available via the Appstore for a usually minimum sum.
No default facebook store (although you can purchase an addon from the AppStore)

What payments methods are supported by Shopify?

All the major credit card gateways, Paypal, Google Checkout and several cusotm methods like Money Order, Bank Deposit and Cash on Delivery.

What shipping methods does Shopify support?

FedEx, UPS, USPS are the only shipping providers supported at the moment. Shopify does support various fulfilment services including Amazon, Shipwire and Webgistix.

Would I recommend Shopify?

Yes. It does cost more than carts like BigCommerce or CoreCommerce but it is worth every single cent if you want a wonderful looking site that is very easy to manage and use.

This Shopify review last updated January 2012

As a bonus this year I have built a question and answer community built around the guide. Go to ask.whichcart.com to get one on one help with deciding what ecommerce platform to build your business on.

5 Best Shopping Carts for 2012.

BigCommerce
The most features, very good looking, very stable and 24/7 support. Only two real downsides. No wholesale customer supprt (I don’t care what they say) and you need a seperate account for every store you setup. [Read BigCommerce Review]

Shopify
Very simple to setup and use. If you have beautiful products you need Shopify to do them justice. If you just want to sell products checkout Shopify before you check the others. It generally costs more by the time you buythe addons you need but the user experience is unparalleled. [Read Shopify Review - coming tomorrow]

Americommerce
Have more than one store? Wish you could run them all from one backend? Get Americommerce and you can. You also get excellent SEO, built in newsletters and affiliate programs, lots of reports and statictics, marketing and promotional tools [Read Americommerce Review]

CoreCommerce
CoreCommerce updates more frequently than any other shopping cart software. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of ecommerce and give your sales every new benefit CoreCommerce is the cart you want to be on. [Read CoreCommerce Review]

Pinnacle Cart
The best marketing tools in the industry make Pinnacle a must have on every top 5 list. Drift marketing, Global Price Sales and Product Update Emails will send your sales through the roof. If your sales have been weak consider a look at Pinnacle Cart. [Read Pinnacle Cart Review]

Notable Mention for 2012

Ashop Commerce. Wonderful cart, includes an Australian version for the Aussies (including toll free support, Australia Post and all major banks supported). Beautiful free themes and solid SEO basis and tools. No matter where you are in the world Ashop will give you excellent ecommerce, I can not wait to work with this platform again. [Read Ashop Commerce Review]

Volusion is back in favour. It is still the most difficult shopping cart to make look good but they have made some dramatic changes in the latest release to make the back end administration much easier to use. It is still rather overwhelming but at least if you need to use Volusion you will not go crazy in the process.  [Read Volusion Review]

Best Licensed Shopping Cart Software in 2012

Interspire – although i suspect it will be gone soon, the updates are getting fewer and further between. I love the cart and you can still use it but yo might need to find a developer to back you up when BigCommerce engulfs Interspire and they can it.

Lemonstand – still a massive memory hog though but a good server can take it. Don’t use it at a budget shared host though

Pinnacle Cart – same reasons as hosted

KonaKart – A solid Java entry – don’t move to Java just to use it, but if you are on Java it is a great product with a solid feature set

AspDotNetStorefront – the best cart for a windows environment (without PHP), even supports multistore wonderfully. Worth a look for any organisation.

Best Free Cart of 2012

None. Thats a trick question. Ecommerce software is something you should invest in. If you try and do it cheap you will suffer and so will your sales. Hosted shopping cart platforms cost on average $25/month if that is too much to spend you need to rethink what you are planning.

Best Shopping Cart for WordPress

WP e-commerce
It costs less than a case of beer, has a huge list of eager supporting developers and has been continually improved by it’s New Zealand developer until it has seamless integration into WordPress and a very consistent interface.

Best low cost ecommerce platforms

WP e-commerce Gold Cart – $40.00
BigCartel – $9.99/month
CoreCommerce – $19.99/month

Shopping Carts to avoid in 2012

Magento and Magento GO
Simply put magento in any form is the most complicated and expensive shopping cart experience you can have. Give it a wide berth.

osCommerce
osCommerce was old 8 years ago, in 2012 it is just plain sad. On the bright side it hasn’t had a new release in almost a year so perhaps it is finally on it’s way out.

ZenCart
ZenCart, like osCommerce is just plain old. Worse though than osCommerce is that ZenCart designers and store owners all seem to be colour blind. I still have a headache form the last Zencart site I had to fix.

Conclusion

There is no conclusion I just didn’t want to end the article on ZenCart that would be tragic. I will come back to this in a couple of days once you have all picked my recommendations to pieces. In the meanwhile head over to ask.whichcart.com if you have questions about what cart to use or leave a comment, I love comments.