E-commerce solutions

We offer cost efficient, robust, and easy-to-maintain e-commerce solutions based on various vendors' software packages, tailored to fit your business needs and fully customized to fit your website's overall look. Features include

• shopping cart,
• online credit card and PayPal processing,
• shipment tracking,
• inventory management,
• smooth synchronization between online and offline data sources,
• coupons, special offers, and customer specific pricing
• subscriptions and periodic billing
• mass product and price updates
• coupon processing
• cross- and upselling
• tax calculations
• associates / campaign dode dapture
• electronic file/document/software download
• gift certificates

and more.

Here are just a few ecommerce software packages we've worked with:

Fully featured "ultra low cost" solution: Candypress

One of the best deals for starter e-commerce sites has to be Candypress.com. This software might have a strange name – but as a full-featured e-commerce solution, it is outstanding. It is scalable to large SQL Server or MySQL databases and is fully customizable as it includes the complete ASP source code.

We've looked at the code and found that it is very clean and well-written. This e-commerce solution is easy to administer even for store owners who don't know much about computers. Amazingly, this product costs only $59.99.

Comprehensive e-commerce solutions: BVCommerce and Storefront.net

For business owners who can invest $1500 or more in their store software, both BVCommerce and Storefront.NET are valid options. We've been involved in Storefront.NET solutions since the early 2000's (when they were still ASP-based). At the time, it was one of the best solutions out there. However the company went through growing pains updating to the .NET platform; a bug-ridden version was released and sold prematurely, which turned into a support nightmare for customers who took the "upgrade" bait. This led us to discontinue recommending the software.

Storefront.NET is still a very popular software solution, however recent reviews on CNET.com lead us to believe that the company might still have deficits in customer-friendliness.

BV Commerce is more affordable, and it does include the Visual Basic .NET source code, which makes it possible to add features if necessary. However, last time we installed it for a client, there were still deficits in the search engine friendliness of the product pages.

Yahoo Stores

Yahoo® Stores are a classic choice for many online merchants. A very simple, easy-to-use solution that accomodates even larger product lines. Being featured in Yahoo®'s marketplace provides you with a built-in customer base. Also, the pages are tend to be search engine friendly (with some modifications), partly due to the fact that they have few dynamic parameters in the URL.

We'll help you customize your Yahoo® Store to give it a sleek design beyond the basic templates - we have a lot of experience in their proprietary RTML language.

Their "Merchant Starter" package is $39.99 per month and includes hosting, but additional fees quickly drive up the cost as your product catalog and sales volume grows. Also, if your product catalog changes often, you will probably prefer a solution that gives you direct access to the product database.

Miva Merchant

Miva Merchant has been one of the most popular solutions for years because it has often been included with small business hosting plans. It is difficult to set up, and you have to rely on your hosting company for backups. Moving your store to a different platform or host later on can be a challenge, too. Customer service lacks but we subscribed to the online user group for a long time and found most of our answers there concerning customization, bug fixes etc.

Administrative features have improved greatly during the last few years, but if you're just starting out looking for an e-commerce solution, Miva Merchant might not make the cut - it "boxes you in" to a host and platform similar to (or worse than) Yahoo Stores without its advantages.

Other e-commerce solutions

The recommendations above represent just a small selection. We are happy to help you with any e-commerce solution you choose! For example, we can help you get set up with a simple online catalog and check-out page using AmeriCart, Mal's E-commerce, or another free/low-cost provider of your choice.

If your existing hosting plan already includes a shopping cart feature you want to use, we can help you with that, too; examples: BetterCart.com, CartIt, CoolCart, CyberOffice Shopping Cart, MerchandiZer, DesignCart, DREAMcommerce, iisCART2000, Merchant-Store.com, Monster Commerce, Pro Cart, RealCart, X-Cart... We can accomodate any product for your e-commerce solution.

Contact us for a free e-mail or phone consultation

Use the Get a free web design quote page to contact us with your question. We're happy to discuss different options with you, and recommend a solution based on your individual needs.

We also specialize in converting online stores between different e-commerce solutions (such as to and from Yahoo Stores) and adding automatic Froogle data feed generation so your products will appear and be up-to-date in Google's shopping section.