There are hundreds of choices for ecommerce shopping cart technology solutions, and the best of the lot – in functionality, support, SEO values, developer community, and up-to-date extensions – is Magento

Just about all of us have shopped online from time to time, and some do the majority of their shopping there. Indeed, Cyber Monday – the online shopping answer to traditional retail’s Black Friday sales spectacular – this year (Monday Nov. 28, 2011) posted some $1.3 billion in online sales in the U.S., a spectacular increase of 22% over last year and the largest single day of online shopping in history, according to the internet data tracking firm ComScore.

Traditional retailers still hold sway for overall sales numbers, of course, but the gap is narrowing. American consumers dropped an estimated $11.4 billion on Black Friday, Nov. 25, but that was just 7% more than last year. And the Black Friday retail number included some $816 million spent online on that day, with nearly $480 million spent online on Thanksgiving Day.

For the first 4 weeks of November, ComScore said, online sales topped $15 billion, up 15% from the same period in 2010.

What has made this all possible is an ecommerce technology first developed in the mid-1990s and evolving at lightning speed ever since called shopping cart technology. In general terms, it is the equivalent of the shopping cart that people push around in a brick-and-mortar store: it is a computer program that “holds” the items selected and then leads to “checkout” where the sales transaction is consummated.

But, of course, it’s much more elaborate than that. Unlike what goes on in a physical store, online shopping cart technology can make immediate suggestions for related items – think khaki pants to go with that red sweater. It also logs in and remembers the customer, handles billing and shipping easily, keeps track of order history over time, and communicates with the customer via email, smart phone and/or text with updates on shipping progress, ideas for future purchases, come-ons for specials, and can even maintain affinity groups where discounts and specials are automatically tracked.

Moreover, this online shopping technology is also a wonder for the merchant from an administration point of view. It marries well with accounting and inventory software to automatically update records in both, spits out reports in a variety of handy formats for reporting purposes, weds to popular content management programs which can handle marketing and customer feedback instantly, and it connects right into such Search Engine Optimization programs as Google Analytics to boost SEO values and keep new customers coming to the online store.

The most obvious example of where online shopping cart technology has taken hold is Amazon.com, which developed its own proprietary technology and launched in 1995 and has since taken the world by storm with continuing technology improvements, ever-expanding product categories, and something like 80 million active credit card accounts. To say that Amazon has set the ecommerce standard isn’t just an understatement, it is now axiomatic, an iconic aspiration for every other ecommerce entrant for the foreseeable future.

However, for most online retailers – the big hitters and the mom-and-pops alike – building one’s own proprietary online shopping cart is prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, the internet world of developers and programmers has responded with hundreds of choices of off-the-shelf shopping cart programs that, in some cases, can handle even the kind of robust traffic and sales records enjoyed by Amazon.

And the good news is, particularly for the smaller e-tailers, that many of these programs are what is known in the business as “open source,” meaning that the basic technology is free and in some cases even people with a modicum of computer savvy can get a small store up and running and get into the ecommerce game.

But for more sophisticated online shopping sites – those with hundreds or thousands of products and SKUs (standard stocking units; think size small in green), and high traffic rates – there are armies of developers highly skilled in taking the open-source software and creating very robust, customized shopping websites to the next level. Plus, in most of these cases the companies that have developed the open-source software offer licensed and paid-for versions with full support and a community of developers that keep up with the fast-paced change of ecommerce. The advantage is that a fully functional shopping website can be up and running at a fraction of the time it would take building a proprietary program.

There are hundreds of these off-the-shelf shopping cart technology software programs on the market and anyone looking to become an online e-tailer should look closely at functionality, price, support, and the developer network required to get just the right solution. In the case of a small website for selling a few products to a limited audience, there are choices that are merely tack-ons to popular CMS programs, like WordPress, that will do the job. But the bigger e-tailers, and those looking to launch multiple store fronts, the costs can be high, so it’s best to find the solution that will meet needs for a launch and well into the future. It will be money well spent.

For research purposes – and research is highly recommended – there are various types of solutions to look for. In the hosted cart category – that is, technology that is hosted online for a fee from the provider – look for names like AAcart.com, eCrater.com, Etsy.com, GoEmerchant.com, Merchandizer.com, NetworkSolutions.com, SmallBusiness.Yahoo.com, StoreFront.net, and Stores.eBay.com. They come with various price levels and widely varying levels of support.

In the free self-hosted carts category, look to CubeCart, Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software, IdeaCart, JadaSite, Magento Community Edition, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Quick.Cart.Lite, Satchmo, Ubercart, VirtueMart , and Zen Cart.

For the purchasable self-hosted carts category, seek out 1ShoppingCart, Actinic, CS-Cart, Interspire, JShop Server, JustAddCommerce, Lite Commerce, Miva Merchant, ShopSite, VP-ASP, WebMasterCart, and X-Cart. Fees and functionality are widely varying.

For simple WordPress shopping carts, there are eShop, Quick Shop, WP e-Commerce, and YAK for WordPress. These mostly tack on the blogs and convert products into a shopping environment.

Here at Unleaded Group, we have researched and studied shopping cart technology for more than 15 years. Indeed, we began building online merchant websites in the 1990s by building a proprietary solution from scratch, so we know the ins and outs of these programs from the ground up. After plying this trade for more than a decade, however, we discovered that the very best solution available on the market today for online shopping cart technology is Magento. As such, we have signed on with Magento, becoming a Gold Level Solution Partner – the highest category available – by taking classes, attending seminars, and most importantly developing scores of Magento websites. We firmly believe there is no better solution.

Magento at its core is a free open-source shopping cart platform, called the Community Edition. Anyone can download it and with a relatively good level of computer and internet expertise make a nice online shopping site. Magento offers no support at this level.

But working with such expert developers as Unleaded Group, Magento offers both the Enterprise and Professional editions, that come with full support from the company and that are being used by thousands of the most sophisticated online merchants anywhere. Merchants at these levels also enjoy an enormous and growing community of developers that have brought out dozens of add-on modules that support a full range of related shopping activities, and the solution is now fully integrated to handle mobile versions for the growing marketplace for shopping from smart phones and pads.

Magento was a direct response to the emerging new needs of today's online merchants. More than any feature or functionality, what clients really needed was "flexibility." The primary goal with Magento was to develop a platform that put the control back in the hands of the online merchant and placed no constraints on business processes and flow.

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, merchandising and content management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

Magento offers a great number of options including layered one page checkout. Using Magento dropdown menus for prices, products, and colors potential customers save their time for choosing the right product. They don’t have to wander from one page to the other in order to find these details.

Compare products option allows future customers choose several products from Magento online store and compare them in order to buy the most appropriate one. Each customer can also make a review on the products he/she has purchased from Magento store. Reading product reviews help people make the right choice.

Purchasing products in Magento store customers can send them to multiple shipping addresses within one transaction. It’s easy to shop at Magento online stores so they bring good profits to Magento store owners. It’s also easy to change currency and language while buying something at Magento store. It means international clients have nothing to worry about.

Magento is a PHP based open source e-commerce solution which empowers a website by incorporating a number of useful features. Magento surpasses all other e-commerce solutions because of its splendid features. With the help of these features merchants can get a feature-rich online store which meets all business requirements and is also easy to manage. Some of the useful features which help Magento to fare better than other e-commerce solutions are:

• Robustness: Magento is a very robust e-commerce platform which has the capability to develop an online store within a short span of time. A Magento shopping cart is equipped with all the advanced features.
• Big community: Magento community has a large number of Magento developers who can offer suggestions and share important facts. This ensures that advice will be readily available in case you need it.
• Transparency: Since Magento is an open source platform, its operations are transparent which makes it easy for users to understand Magento's functionality. An online store owner can easily work with Magento without having any knowledge about the technology.
• Quality traffic: With the help of Magento's extensive search engine optimization capabilities, you can attract quality traffic and convert it into conversions. This ultimately helps in gaining better search engine ranking.
• Numerous extensions: Magento has a large number of useful extensions which help to extend the functionality of an online store to a great extent. It makes the shopping cart more customized and improves its existing features.
• Multiple payment options: Magento supports a number of payment options as well as many international currencies. This makes the shopping experience quite convenient and provides an unmatched shopping cart.
• Flexibility: Magento development provides a highly flexible shopping cart in which you can add or eliminate features as per your requirements. In fact, you can easily migrate to Magento from any other platform.
• Multi Store Capability. Magento offers Multi Store Capability i.e. it allows you to run more than one store. So even if you currently have 2, 5 or 20 stores, they can be managed from the same admin panel. So in this way you can manage orders and customers at one place without switching to any other website. This makes it easier for you to manage things easily. This is one the major reason for choosing Magento over other ecommerce software.
• SEO Friendliness. Search engine friendliness is Magento’s core feature. This feature of Magento allows you various option such as SEO friendly Rewrites, auto generated sitemaps (both HTML & XML). These options help in getting good search engine rankings and improve website visibility.
• Guest Check Out. With Magento, you will get guest checkout alternative. In this alternative, you can apart yourself from the crowd. In many online stores, the customer must sign before buying, but this method can save time and also help in retaining customers who may not like to register at first. This feature also improves conversion rates.
• Integrated sales and store tracking Magento gives an option of integrated sales and store tracking. You can manage all your sales and customers from single page which result in saving of time.
• No limits on number of product or purchases there is no limit as far as number of products are concerned. You can upload “N” number of products.
• Catalog. The Catalog is excellent and has facilities which none other shopping cart has in the market.
• Product Categorization. Magento has features which enable it to hold thousands of product categorized by their classes and categories without making the shopping cart slow.
• Payment Gateway Integration.
• Integrated Google analytics. Magento offers Google analytics integration.
• Affinity groups. Magento allows for the creation of customer categories, or affinity groups, where special pricing can be revealed to members.
• Coupons. Magento is great for creating specials and coupons to boost sales.

Do research and we believe any online merchant or potential new merchant will discover that Magento is by far the best shopping cart technology. Here at Unleaded Group we have built over 11 of these Magento sites, some brand new and others moved from different solutions to Magento to upgrade functionality. We are fully versed in the integration of supporting software, like accounting and inventory, within the Magento solution, and in integrating such great CMS platforms at ExpressionEngine, which works marvelously with Magento.

When you are ready to move to the next level of ecommerce, call Unleaded Group at 855-UNLEADED (865-3233) for complete details.