Open Cart - Shopping Cart Review

If you have read My prior post you will know that this blog is about making money online by selling. It is My primary source of income and things like Adsense and Kontera are secondary sources of income for me. That said I'm always on the look out for new and note worthy shopping cart software. When I just started selling online My first shopping cart was a crude FREE one that was tied to Paypal and nothing else. My customers would be able to add items to cart and before they checkout they would have to fill out a form with their name, address etc. and then submit it, at the end of this the shopping cart would provide them with a small button to click so they can pay through Paypal. Guess what ? That system really sucked ! for every 5 orders I got only 2 of my customers would actually click the Paypal button and pay. This was very depressing as I would loose 60% of my orders based on free technology, but free was all I could afford a little under a year ago when I was just started out in My online sales venture.

The next shopping cart I chose had more payment processing options (it had Google Checkout and Paypal ) but it lacked what I like to call the " Costco Effect ". What is the Costco effect you may ask ? Simple. Membership. Why I call this the Cosco Effect ? Costco is a membership only store like Wal-Mart but cheaper because they sell in bulk. I have bought there before because I'm a member and think it's cheaper than Wal-Mart. It's really not in the long run, it's mainly because you buy in bulk you get a discount but do I really need 40 pounds of chicken ? that will last me a year as a single man and it will certainly spoil by then. However me and thousands of other people on a daily basis flock to Costco for the savings. After some research I learned that people who have memberships at a certain sites are more likely to go back there to shop versus another site with similar or the same products even if it's cheaper. So now I realized I needed a shopping cart that provided My customers with the ability to create an account with a user name and password so they can login and do things like view their orders. My research had shown that these type of sites increase sales by 27%. This was a number I needed a 27% increase in sales would do me good. So I started Googling for a new shopping cart and almost a year later (after I started selling online) I now had some funds to spare.

My Search for the Perfect Shopping Cart:

The first thing I decided to do was to examine brand name sites to see who provided their shopping carts. I narrowed it down to 4 carts:

• Web Asyst Shop Script
• Volusion
• Open Cart
• os Commerce

Volusion hands down seem to be the most popular one it's used by large corporations like, Disney, Motorola, Ed Hardy and Crutchfield. They have all the standard membership features but they charge a monthly fee from $29.95 to $99.95 depending on how many items you add to the store.....mmmm nah...not in my budget.

Web Asyst Shop Script this was the company that made the free cart I started out with. The pay version is loaded with features. The feature that almost sold me was the Affiliate Widget. This allows your customers to become resellers of your items it gives them some code like Adsense so they can paste it on their blog, website or social network and if some one buys it gives them a commission. Awesome stuff but very pricey...this will cost you $300 per site you install it on.

os Commerce is ok, it's open source and it's free... but it's god aweful ugly. Yuck !

Open cart sold me first just by the interface it was well designed with a nice fluid layout that encourages people to buy (this was tested by several tipsy college girls in my dorm room :) It's open source too like os Commerce but Open Cart is the sexier of the too (os Commerce and Open cart are like two hot sisters but Open Cart is the cart with the bigger boobs :) The admin area is very powerful and allows you to do some really neat things like set different payment options on your site and the order in which they appear.
Notice in the screen shot that I have Paypal as the first payment option. This is for a number of reasons like they have 100 million paypal users and people feel a lot safer buying via Paypal and Paypal orders represent 95% of my online sales. The second option is via credit card for people who don't have Paypal or hate paypal and just want to pay via Credit / Debit card. It's processed by Paypal but the customer enters their card info on My site and Paypal processess it right on my site in the background and returns with a Approve or Declined message before the order is complete. Cool Huh ? This done by using the Paypal Direct API and Open Cart supports this. You need to do two things to have this work with Paypal
1.) Sign up for Website Payments Pro through Paypal it will cost 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction + $30.00 USD per monthly fee but trust me it's worth it to take Credit Card orders from directly with in your site as this will boost sales by another 14%.

2.) Set Up the API on Paypal.com and then add the API user name, password and API signature to Open Cart and you will be ready to take credit card payments live on your site. Setting up the API in Paypal is kinda tedious so here is a video to show you how its done:


The other cool feature about Open Cart is the neat shipping cost options. You can set up one flat fee (on my site it's $10 ) or charge a per item fee (I charge $5 ) and in addition to those two you can also give free shipping if the order value is above a certain amount, on my site I set this to $100 so each order total $100 or higher gets free shipping as shown in this screen shot . The sub-total is $119.85 on this order so the option to select free shipping becomes available to the customer. If the sub-total was less than a $100 they would only have two choices for shipping cost: flat fee $10 or $5 per item. This as you can image helps to boost sales. You would be surprised to know how many people add extra stuff to their cart just to get it to $100 bucks to get free shipping. It's human nature we love to win and earning the right to get free shipping to them is like they won a prize this is called the Winning Feeling effect.

The final selling point on Open Cart I want to touch on is the ability take coupons. I use coupons codes for My exisiting customers. I email it to them (from the admin area in Open Cart) when I have a new item in stock that I want to start selling or to speed up sales of slow items. Using the same order as before have a look at this screen shot:

You will notice that a coupon was applied to the cart before checkout and it dropped the overall total from $119.85 to $107.87 this has three effects:

1.) you are letting the customer get the Winning Feeling again by letting them save money.

2.) You are introducing a new product or boosting sales on a lagging item.

3.) You are creating repeat buyers, the life blood of the retail industry and this is something you need if want to continue to make money online.

Open Cart makes it very easy for you to apply coupons to your cart, lets take a look at the admin area for the coupon section. Notice that you can set the discount as a percentage of the overall cost or a monetary value like $10 off with a particular code. You can also set it up so that the coupon can have features like free shipping. Item assignment of the coupon is also another cool option. So lets say you have a site selling ladies shoes and you want to boost sales on some shoes that are not moving fast enough. You can apply a 10% off coupon code to that particular shoe or shoes in the coupon admin area just by selecting it or them from the Products list (as shown in the screen shot ) adding this coupon code to your email campaign (which you can run from inside Open Cart ) will help to boost sales. If they buy more items on the site while buying the discounted shoes the coupon will only apply the discount to the specified shoes, you win by up selling other items and selling some shoes that were not selling so well and they still get the Winning Feeling by saving money with the coupon . That's what you call a win win situation.

Open Cart is perfect for small to medium sized online retailers like myself, it's robust, flexible, well designed and best of all it's free. To me it has become a very useful tool in my quest to make money online.

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You can see Open Cart in action (live demo) here.