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Why use commercial shopping carts software when the are numerous open source alternatives?

There are many reasons for preferring a commercial shopping cart software to an open source one. For some people, there is comfort to be gained from knowing that there is a regular company behind the software , rather than an amorphous group of developers. After all, if you have paid for the software, you have the right to expect it to work as advertised, and the right to complain if it doesn’t.  There is at least a tangible company that can be held to account for any failings in the software.

A commercial company is also more likely to have a focus on keeping the software up to date and a need to stay ahead of their competitors in bringing innovations into their software.

The open source ecommerce giant osCommerce has suffered for instance from lack of this focus, with v3 of the software being promised and delayed for years while various developers became disillusioned or simply got fed up of waiting and went off in their own directions with their own versions.

Commercial companies also tend to be more customer-focussed – they need to sell their software in a competitive environment, so a lot of effort goes into making the software easy to use and adaptable.

There are two kinds of commercial shopping carts software, server based and desktop based.

Desktop based, as it implies, runs on your desktop PC – all shop design, product maintenance, pricing, stock control, updating etc and usually order processing too – is performed on your PC. The software then creates the HTML pages that make up your website and uploads them to your server along with the scripts that handle the  shopping cart. After a customer has made a purchase, the software downloads the details back into the desktop software for processing.

This has a number of advantages for the small business, but also an increasing number of disadvantages. Because the entire website is on the local PC, it remains completely under the control of the business, and is relatively safe from hackers. Any problem with the website or the hosting and a clean version of the site can simply be uploaded. As the design and building of the site is done locally, it can be previewed and amended before going live – similarly when new products are added business can check what it looks like before uploading.

The major disadvantage is that the site on the web is essentially a static website – the database holding the product and customer details is on the local machine. This means for instance that stock levels are not automatically adjusted on the website, leading to the possibility of selling goods that are out of stock, and customers cannot login to see the staus of their order, or previous orders, which they are increasingly expecting to be able to do. There are a number of other disadvantages – changes and updates can only be made from the PC on which the software is installed, and even minor changes may mean whole pages, or even the entire site may need re-uploading rather than just the change itself.

The majority of commercial shopping carts are database driven dynamic sites where the entire site and software is on the server, with no need to install any software on the local PC. This means that changes can be made in real time from any PC that the site administrator is using, eg from a laptop while on the road. Shop sales automatically update stock levels immediately, and customers can log on to their accounts and view their account details.

The disadvantages are that the software needs to be kept secure and up to date, and that all changes and additions to the site are made on the live site.

In general, if you are comfortable with delving into the code to adapt the default settings to meet your needs, then open source software may be the way to go, however, if you want a user -friendly solution and the comfort of knowing that support is available from the manufacturer, then your best bet is liable to be commercial shopping carts software.