For anything else, there are the shopping cart apps. You can get all the most popular addons, though the more obscure ones might be missing. You can run a CS-Cart store without knowing the first thing about code.
Most users can handle everything with just common sense and a few knowledge base searches. CS-Cart is for you if you want a powerful software without having to deal with the technical details. CS-Cart comes with a few free themes and a few hundred premium ones. The templates are decent if a little bland. The visual editor makes up for it. You can easily customize any theme to your liking without touching code. If you are an avid developer, you do get a code editor.
You can change the template design or even implement custom solutions. Operating in over countries, CS-Cart has proven to be fit for international retail. Consequently, it features 70 different payment processors. There are no monthly plans.
Both plans come with the full set of features. This makes CS-Cart lucrative for mid-sized businesses. The annual price is lower than that of your average shopping cart monthly plan. To top it off, the feature set is among the best out there.
CS-Cart can also be a powerful solution for small businesses. Otherwise, the charges might go beyond your budget. You get 50 support credits when you purchase the software. You can use these to purchase support services. There is a whole payment structure you can check out. Additional credits are expensive, though, and they go pretty quickly. A trip to the knowledge base can save you a lot of money. Only use support as a last resort.
CS-Cart seems well-loved. Most shopping cart software reviews commend the quality features, and countless users praise the support team. As with any provider that charges extra for support, CS-Cart gets a few complaints. PrestaShop might not be as old as a few other solutions, but it is just as influential.
It supports over , websites in 60 different languages. Plus, the platform is free to download. PrestaShop comes with over features out of the box. Including that many functions shows dedication, even though more than just numbers goes into shopping cart comparisons.
The noteworthy features include an SEO tool, tax calculation, abandoned cart notifications, automated emails, support for multiple languages and currencies, and much more. The PrestaShop marketplace has over a thousand additional apps. Thus, you can get all the functionality you might need. PrestaShop dashboard is surprisingly simple, considering the number of features. It has a bit of a learning curve, but most users get the hang of it fairly quickly.
It often takes changing the code to put everything together. PrestaShop is not the best shopping cart solution for DIY users. From there, the editor offers better customization than most. You can also edit the website code. All in all, PrestaShop does splendidly in the design department. PrestaShop has no out of the box payment processors. Customers can only pay by wire transfer or check.
Seven payment integrations are free—this includes popular ones like Stripe, Skrill, and PayPal. The transaction fee is what matters here, though.
It might be worth it to spend a few bucks to get better rates. Getting a couple of integrations can cost a few hundred dollars. If you run a smaller business, you could find a cheaper online ordering software. PrestaShop offers no support by default. This gives you 6h of support time for the whole year—how lovely, right? What PrestaShop lacks in support, it makes up for with an active community forum and the knowledge base. It is rich with guides and training courses.
Asking someone experienced for advice can help with the addons. Otherwise, you might have to pay to fix everything. All things considered, PrestaShop offers great features. It can be the best free shopping cart, but, ironically, you need good budgeting.
Famed as the first PHP e-commerce software and the fastest shopping cart, X-Cart has quite a reputation to live up to. Plus, the base version is completely open-source. You can check out the full list on their website. Features are abundant, and they showcase real quality.
X-Cart gives you everything you need to design a high-level store. X-Cart might be one of the best open-source shopping carts, but open-source still means less invested developers and a somewhat quirky product. Installing it or connecting it to your site does require technical expertise. The latter is probably safer. From there, the visual interface is actually remarkably user-friendly. Despite the sea of features, even first-timers can navigate the dashboard easily. Just keep in mind open-source storefront software can get messy.
You can customize the themes with the drag and drop editor. This offers some customizability, but for a unique appearance, you need to edit the CSS. X-Cart offers 67 payment gateways, 36 of which come out of the box. The rest are available as paid apps. X-Cart also offers an X-Payments package, which adds 55 more gateway providers. It is PCI-Compliant and ensures the security of transactions and customer data. Still, you can easily ensure PCI-compliance with it.
Plus, it makes you nearly invulnerable to fraud. The free version is, well, free. Its features are nevertheless everything a medium-sized business can ask for. Of course, you still have to pay for a theme, apps, and other services. All things considered, X-Cart will always cost more than the average cart software. Luckily, you can pay for some. The price is at the high end, but the service is top-shelf.
It is one of the most praised features among X-Cart users. Just read the terms before purchasing support. X-Cart gets positive reviews from experienced coders and non-technical users alike. They mostly praise the great features and consistent updates.
Users almost unanimously agree the software has scaled amazingly over the years. There are astonishingly few negative reviews. The more common complaints are that X-Cart is expensive and highly demanding on the servers. Both are true. For a free shopping cart software, X-Cart can be expensive.
Seeing that X-Cart caters to larger businesses, though, higher costs are understandable. All in all, X-Cart is a fantastic solution for those who can afford it. This usually means large retailers exclusively.
Today, you can use it as a regular website builder, or you can integrate the storefront into your existing website. No wonder it considered one the best shopping cart software for international stores. A few important ones are the SEO Tools, analytics, one-page checkout, guest checkout, excellent multilingual and multi-currency features, tax and vat calculators.
It also offers a plethora of in-depth features. You can ask CoreCommerce support for the full list of features. The offer is fairly comprehensive and can accommodate even large businesses just fine. Mind that, unlike other shopping carts in these reviews, CoreCommerce is primarily intended as a SaaS solution.
This option is definitely more convenient for beginners. Still, you do have to sacrifice more control than with typical shopping cart solutions. This makes setting everything up reasonably straightforward. The visual interface itself got a recent upgrade. The admin dashboard is among the simpler ones. You can also hover over question mark symbols that explain what each feature does.
With that said, there are a lot of features. That, in and of itself, entails a bit of a learning curve. All in all, CoreCommerce is simple, but not as simple as, for instance, Square. You get 18 free responsive themes. There are two more unresponsive themes, but responsive design is a must-have. The number of themes is fine, but not amazing. As for customization, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to move around page elements. This can be annoying. CoreCommerce does lower the CorePayments transaction fee to 2.
It can be a very lucrative payment processor. The plans mostly differ only in the sales cap. The personal plan is relatively limited—you can only sell three products, and you get 1Gb of storage and 2Gb of bandwidth. Most other plans remove these limitations. However, I do recommend at least checking out the features of each plan carefully before going with one.
All in all, the pricing is in the low-end of shopping cart software. Fortunately, the support makes up for it. The technical team is available through phone, email, and chat. It is fast and resolves all problems quickly. Seeing as your store on their servers, though, you have little choice if you need custom features. A few users complain that CoreCommerce has increased the prices without prior notification.
CoreCommerce did upgrade its system massively, so the price increase seems justified. It is somewhat neglectful if the existing customers went unnotified, though. Still, reviews like these are best taken with a grain of salt. They can point out crucial factors about the service but tend to be very subjective nevertheless. CoreCommrece has plenty of attractive features and is reasonably priced as well.
As the name suggests, OpenCart is an open-source shopping cart. You can do easy product management, sell physical and digital products, calculate tax and shipping rates automatically, view reports and analytics, and enable one-page and guest checkout. Visitors can also filter products, leave reviews, take advantage of discounts and coupons, sign up for your newsletter, and much more. The digital shopping cart also has solid multilingual and multi-currency support.
Different currencies update automatically, and OpenCart already supports various languages, including LTR ones. You can easily set up a store that caters to an international audience. There is even an affiliate system built-in. You can get others to promote your products without going through the trouble of plugging in a separate solution.
If you need something more, the plugin library contains several comprehensive SEO add-ons. Like WooCommerce and Magento, the ecommerce shopping cart software strives to be lightweight. Over 13, extensions are available, covering all sorts of possibilities, from simple widgets to PCI compliance tools. You can find pretty much anything in the marketplace, though some extensions may be paid. This is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Relying on plugins this way makes the software leaner, so you can expect fast load times.
Making everything work might require some coding skills, though. For starters, you can usually install the cart in one click via Softaculous. The dashboard is also uncluttered and very intuitive. You should have zero issues handling day-to-day operations like adding products, managing shipping rates, or configuring emailing. That said, a few online shopping cart reviews out there praise OpenCart for being beginner-friendly. This is misleading. OpenCart helpfully suggests a few PHP developers on its site.
Hiring a dev to do maintenance is a cost you will have to take into account, though. OpenCart runs a variety of themes, some free and some paid. You can even get themes from third-party vendors like ThemeForest.
For instance, more premium themes can include a design-free page builder and a ton of unique widgets. In contrast, more affordable themes usually leave it at the core functionality. You can also install an editor plugin for the default theme. This expands the tools to edit aspects of the shopping cart app, like styling. In such cases, you would have to edit the code yourself and build what you need.
By default, OpenCart supports 36 payment gateway providers. In addition to this, over 1. Some of these are paid, though, so you should check the pricing for your preferred gateway beforehand. Still, you get plenty of ways to capture payment information than with OpenCart. OpenCart is free to download, use, and modify. You can create as many websites as you want with no restrictions. That said, there are still costs to consider with the shopping software.
You might want specific themes or extensions, which are sometimes paid. You also get a guarantee the team will fix the issue if it recurs within 30 days. This is excellent insurance in case of emergencies.
This covers bug fixes, installation service, and consultations about modules. A lot of users adore OpenCart. They love how straightforward the admin dashboard is and how fast and effective the solution is.
A few store owners did complain about the solution lacking support. The software has been around for 11 years, and it has amassed quite a user base, including companies like Volvo, Lacoste, and Casio. After all, most websites are hosted on Linux. Yet, it would be unfair not to mention any alternatives. As for the features, nopCommerce gives you all you need to set up a midrange or large store. You can even run multiple stores from one admin or set up a robust online marketplace and let internet merchants sell on your platform.
You have a ton of options for adding products, and you can easily create dozens of product variants by mixing different attributes. You can also calculate shipping rates, access multiple shipping carriers, configure taxes by country, state, or zip code, and a bunch of other options.
The checkout features are rather robust as well. Aside from the usual, you can enable advanced shopping cart options like one-page checkout or displaying a mini shopping cart while your clients are browsing. You can take advantage of many marketing tools, including emailing features, an affiliate system, a reward point system, upsell features, discounts and coupons, and a lot more. A comprehensive SEO suite is in the mix too, with features like microdata and breadcrumbs support.
If something you need is missing, nopCommerce has a massive library with 1, plugins. You can find tools for improving page load times, managing popups, providing customer support via live chat, and a whole lot more. Many providers let you set it up in a few clicks via Plesk.
If you use Microsoft Azure, you can also have it preinstalled on a server instance. Configuring the shopping cart program, however, can be tough. Once you do set up the store according to your specifications, you get to enjoy a very well-designed dashboard. Even though it features hundreds of options, all the menu tabs are neatly categorized and laid out clearly.
A nice detail is that you can collapse the controls sidebar to get an even better view of the main screen. You can use 7 free themes with nopCommerce 4. All are well-designed, though you could get more variety. The themes all use Bootstrap, though, meaning they are fully responsive, and they implement commonly used styling features like Font Awesome icons.
These usually integrate paid plugins, feature a professional design, and are meant for easy modification by developers. Some even add features like image zoom that can be helpful for specific industries. Your options are to either purchase a theme editor plugin or hire a developer to get you a unique look.
Do the latter if your business can afford it. While using a plugin is definitely cheaper, it might get you mixed results.
The extension library has more modules that enable processors like AliPay and Apple Pay. The software is free to download, use, and modify.
It basically lets nopCommerce siphon away a part of your traffic through a link in the footer. However, removing or modifying the link yourself would be a copyright violation.
You should also consider how much you would have to spend on premium templates, a theme, and a developer who will set it all up. Like a few other open-source shopping cart apps, nopCommerce offers a premium support service. The support is only available on business days, and it offers a 1-day response time guarantee and a 5-day bug fix guarantee.
They will help you fix any bugs with the core software and answer questions about customizing it. Shopify Academy courses are on-demand and the company offers live coaching calls, a business template library as well as access to a community of entrepreneurs. Shopify lets you quickly see items that need your attention and you can easily track trends. Products, inventory, orders and customers are automatically synced between the Shopify app and the online store.
Adding products, taking product photos, changing a price or adding inventory can be done from a cell phone. Shopify uses smart collections to automatically sort products based on vendor, price and inventory level, offering the option to sort them by category, type, season and more.
The point-of-sale allows for barcode support where existing barcodes can be assigned to products or new barcodes can be created. Shopify subscriptions include a free credit card reader. It can be plugged into a tablet and be functional immediately. Shopify can provide you with a wireless barcode, cash drawers, receipt printers and any other customized items you may need. All hardware has free shipping and a day return policy. Community is a big part of their approach and discussions on topics such as marketing and accounting are encouraged among users.
Best online fax services Best small business phone systems. Best POS Systems. Best accounting software. Best VPS hosting providers: Take your website to the next level. Dubbed QuickAccept, this mobile payments platform will allow merchants to ring up credit card payments via a mobile app or a contactless card reader — much like tools offered already by Square and PayPal.
To work alongside the new payments platform, Chase also announced a business checking account called Business Complete Banking. Nothing is really special about this checking account, although you will need to open one if you want to take advantage of QuickAccept. So even if some companies are ready to fully return to the office, most employees may be less keen to follow suit. And while shrinking office spaces will impact commercial real estate negatively, there are some benefits to smaller office footprints worth noting.
For instance, Americans are still driving less on the roads, even as more and more places are reopening. Remote work can also help reduce overhead costs. In an effort to squeeze money out of its WhatsApp messaging platform, Facebook is set to make several additions to the business side of the service. To start, businesses will be able to sell products to customers within chats.
Why this matters to you: WhatsApp is a messaging platform that reaches over two billion people worldwide. Despite the damage the pandemic has done to restaurants, there is hope yet. A recent Bloomberg report discussed restaurants that have opened up outdoor dining during the pandemic must innovate once again to survive the cold winter months.
Why this matters to you: A glimmer of hope for the restaurant industry shines a beacon across the entire economy — businesses that serve food have been hit hard during lockdowns. COVID remains a deadly virus, and coming up with safe protocols while remaining profitable will be a tall order for many small businesses, including those beyond the restaurant space.
Alongside a rise in joblessness has come a rise in entrepreneurship. According to data by the U. Census Bureau, new businesses filed 1. The Midwest and the South both saw steep rises in particular. MBA applications are also soaring as people look to boost their professional skill set. Why this matters to you: The drastic unemployment stemming from the COVID-generated recession is almost certainly encouraging more and more to try their hand at running a business.
There are plenty of others out there who will hopefully succeed right along with you. The Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans struggled to adequately help many small businesses during the early stages of the pandemic. A Texas farm has been in the news recently for helping special-needs children play and hang out with animals that require special needs, too.
Run as a non-profit organization called Safe in Austin, the farm is home to over animals who are injured or need some type of additional support. Among the residents include a rescued turkey born with a claw abnormality and a calf with a birth defect that fused its legs and spine together. Do you have a story idea, tip, or press release for the Merchant Maverick news team? Shoot us an email: [email protected]. People use it most often to transfer funds between family and friends, but can it also be a good option for online businesses?
The answer is yes, it can. And anything that makes it easier for them to find and pay for the things they need sounds mighty attractive. Plans are underway to add Facebook Pay to WhatsApp soon. After all, the more payment options you give your customers, the easier it can be to make sales to them. Facebook Pay works in a fashion similar to other friend-to-friend payment options, like Venmo and Zelle. The difference right now at least is that Facebook Pay is available only to people who use Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
When people sign up for Facebook Pay, they agree to let Facebook store their credit or debit card information. Facebook Pay works for:. And they can do the same with you, all without leaving the Facebook or Messenger app or having to enter their information each time they want to buy. Facebook Pay is a simple, seamless, and secure payment option for anyone who uses Facebook or Instagram to pay for purchases, donate, or send money to friends and connections.
It makes sense to use Facebook Pay when:. Next, click Settings and then scroll down until you see Facebook Pay in the menu on the left side of the screen. If you want to set up your own account so that you can receive payments via Facebook Pay, the first step is to sign up for the service yourself.
Many small businesses sell successfully on Facebook and Instagram using simple techniques. If your sales plan involves posting information and photos about items you have for sale and then connecting with your friends and followers who indicate interest, you can ask them to pay via Facebook Pay. Once you connect with someone who is interested in purchasing an item from you via Facebook Marketplace, you can use Messenger to set up payment using Facebook Pay.
Facebook Pay is designed for individual use, according to a Facebook representative. However, you can connect with your customers through your page or via Messenger to set up payment using Facebook Pay. No matter how you arrive at the point of sale, once you have someone interested in buying something from you online, let the buyer know that you can accept Facebook Pay. The buyer can arrange payment via Messenger. And once your buyer sends payment via Facebook Pay, how long will it take until you receive the money?
Facebook Pay links with affiliate partners and third parties to facilitate payment transfers. Specifically, Facebook Pay can share your card numbers and other payment method information, your transaction history, or a copy of your identification, according to legal requirements, or to prevent fraud. Facebook Pay can be a convenient payment option under some circumstances. Of course, there are other no-fee options you can use, too.
For bigger businesses or for those that want to open an online store, choosing an option like PayPal may be a better move for you. With so many easy and convenient options for taking payments online, it can be hard to decide which one is best for you. If you regularly connect with customers on Facebook or Instagram, let them know about all the payment methods you can accommodate. After all, the easier you make it for the customer to pay, the more likely you are to complete the sale and pocket the money.
Entrepreneurs looking to build their companies from the ground up often face difficulties getting traditional debt-based financing. Banks, and even many alternative lenders, prefer to do business with companies that have at least six months of operation under their belt, and preferably two to three years. One way around the debt-financing conundrum is to enter the world of investor financing. While equity financing is probably the more well-known method of investor financing, another option is revenue-based financing.
That means businesses planning on a slower growth model, or those that may not be revenue-positive for an extended period of time, are generally not a great fit for revenue-based financing, which is most frequently seen in the tech sector and adjacent businesses.
Repayment caps, which are expressed as a flat multiplier, represent the total amount your investor is expecting to reclaim from you. This rate typically ranges from x1. In some cases, the investors may instead use a date or sustained rate of return as cut-off points. If it decreases, it would take longer.
At their core, both are hedging on your future sales. Both are collecting a percentage of those future sales. Both have indeterminant term lengths due to being revenue contingent.
And both are relatively costly ways to finance your business. That said, there are a few differences between them, namely in terms of scale and scope. Merchant cash advances tend to be based solely on your credit and debit card sales, not your revenue. Payments are usually made daily rather than monthly, and the expected time until settlement is usually much shorter. At this time, merchant cash advances are also available to more companies than revenue-based financing, which tends to be aimed specifically at high-growth businesses like tech startups.
Revenue-based financing sits adjacent to other types of investor-sourced financing like venture capital. Both tend to heavily favor high-growth industries like tech, and both tend to cater to entrepreneurs who normally would have trouble obtaining debt-based financing. This model typically assumes that you intend to sell your company somewhere within a five to seven-year window. Revenue-based financing, on the other hand, does not transfer ownership to the investors. Revenue-based financing, like most investor-based financing, is not as widely available as debt-financing.
Will the growth financed with these funds, minus the burden it puts on your revenue, outpace the growth you would achieve without it? Your gross margin is equal to your revenue minus the cost of the goods you sold. Take that number and divide it by your revenue. But not so fast! Using equity financing as a model, you may expect it to be really difficult to find investors dealing in revenue-based financing.
The ones with a strong web presence may even allow you to apply online. As a general rule, we recommend dealing with lenders and investors who are transparent and disclose the terms of their services upfront. It refers to how a web server is set up and what software it uses to perform specific functions.
Each part of the stack is a piece of software that helps the server run a web application such as a website content management system like WordPress.
Linux is a computer operating system. Apache is web server software that translates server requests into specific instructions for the server. When you type in a website URL, your browser sends a request to a web server. Apache is the software that takes that request and tells the server how to fulfill that request. MySQL is database software that stores all the information for a website application in a structured format.
For example, the text of this post is stored in a MySQL database. When you visited this URL, my server went and retrieved all this text from the database. When you visited this URL, PHP was used to pull all the text, images, fonts, links, etc into a set of files to be delivered to your browser. A LAMP stack is just one of many ways to configure a web server. Like your home PC or smartphone, a server needs several pieces of software to simply function.
And like smartphone apps or PC games, different web applications need different requirements. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. There are a myriad of LAMP stack alternatives. Each of the four parts of LAMP can be changed out for a different piece of software. Plus, there are now stacks available that do not require an operating system like MEAN or the universe of Javascript frameworks. There is a lot that goes into choosing the right stack for your web application.
Most any popular hosting company will support it. You can also install it on most cloud hosting and VPS hosting options. What went wrong? Why were small businesses denied those funds? Keep on reading to find out the top five reasons why small businesses missed out on government loans during the coronavirus pandemic. The first, and most challenging, hurdle for many small business owners involved problems with the actual banks issuing the loans.
Instead, it smooths out the lending process by guaranteeing all or a portion of the loan, making the process less risky in general. According to reader comments, Chase Bank and Bank of America, in particular, struggled with serious issues around applicants and applications. But in general, nothing about the rollout of the SBA loans was well-thought-out, and that left many banks scrambling to come up with their own internal policies amid confusion. The general chaos within the banking community meant that many business owners, even when filing applications correctly, missed out on their piece of the PPP or EIDL funds.
This PPP is such a farce on so many levels. Essentially, they said that the applications automatically go directly to the SBA and the SBA reviews the applications. Well said! I went through the same thing. Waiting, wondering, worrying… no answers, then BAM the money is gone.
Then to hear Chase and the SBA gave millions to businesses that, no doubt, have countless resources at their disposal. Shame on Chase and shame on the SBA as well.
Chase Bank was not alone in its failure to handle the SBA disaster loans rollout. Bank of America also came under heavy scrutiny for the way they processed their loans, resulting in a lawsuit from four small businesses that allege Bank of America prioritized businesses needing larger loan amounts so they could maximize their own profits. Our Merchant Maverick readers experienced the same kind of forced delays in filing loan paperwork that are cited in the lawsuit.
All documentation submitted and confirmed. Then nothing! After 30 years as a small business banking customer, we are disgusted. We applied through Bank of America for the Payroll Protection Plan within three hours of the process opening online on April 3, We uploaded our supporting documents within four hours of the email request for them. Like you, we applied for the PPP through Bank of America our business bank for 21 years on day one and did not end up getting any funds.
All along the way, it seemed there were delays on their end. We would jump whenever they requested information, but then days would go by before we would get another email. Eventually, the money just ran out and we were out of luck. There is no one to give us any information. Now learning that BofA funded some larger businesses that used up millions instead of the small businesses like ours makes me really upset.
Errors abounded, the most of common of which were:. Even during the second round of funding, technology issues ran rampant. The pacing mechanism prevents any one lender from submitting thousands of loans an hour into the E-Tran system. Using a shopping cart software easily helps you bridge the gap between your store and your customers.
Without an online storefront, you lose the opportunity to reach more customers and increase your sales. As online shopping becomes the new norm, merchants take their stores to the web with the help of a shopping cart software.
It allows web buyers to easily browse product descriptions, select items, and make purchases directly from a website. Another important thing to consider is the type of shopping cart software that would best suit your business needs. Industry experts narrowed down the different types of shopping cart software into two—hosted and licensed shopping carts.
Both have their fair share of advantages and disadvantages. In recent years, however, hosted shopping carts are getting way ahead of the competition. The following is a detailed comparison of the two:. This type of shopping cart is usually an open-source platform, allowing you to customize its features with greater flexibility and add third-party applications as necessary.
While it offers rich functionalities, it requires more technical expertise and can be more expensive. Most licensed shopping cart tools usually offer enterprise-level features. A hosted shopping cart software is the choice of most online merchants for several reasons.
First, it is usually more affordable and easy to use. BigCommerce allows you to showcase your products in any web design and layout that match your brand. A shopping cart software acts pretty much like a physical grocery cart. It lets you add as many items to your cart until you decide to proceed to checkout.
However, a shopping cart software serves more functions than its physical counterpart. The following is a list of key features you must consider when looking for this type of software. Most shopping cart platforms have store builder tools that allow you to create your own ecommerce website. They provide design and customization tools that you can use to personalize your website.
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