Making money online is the ambition of many Internet entrepreneurs. This is done mainly either by selling advertising or selling products and services through a web site. Advertising is rather simple to set up. They are usually affiliate links which pay per click or give a commission on a sale. The more knowledgeable user will setup Openads to sell ad space to businesses.

Selling products through a web site is another story. A shopping cart application needs to be installed and there are an overwhelming number of competing applications available. The more advanced ones will allow you process credit card transactions and accept payments through services like PayPal. Selecting shopping cart software is difficult, installing and setting it up can be a challenge.

My first experience with shopping carts is osCommerce. This is a large, full featured application that was not easy to get working. I had to adjust many server settings on my web hosting account just to be able to run it. Once installed, there were many confusing options to make it function properly. There is good documentation available for it, but it will take a great deal of effort to learn how to effectively use the software.

I have nothing against learning new things. If I need to learn a complex application, I’ll take the time to do it, but I’m very busy these days with my family, business, and work so I would rather find an easy to use solution. I thought I found it with Zen Cart. This application takes a different approach to shopping carts and focuses on ease of setup and usage, which it succeeds on both accounts. The only problem is that it seems to be designed to work best with companies that selling physical products and ship them.

I’m selling and giving away software and e-books. I don’t have a physical inventory and I therefore don’t have a need for shipping products. The problem with Zen Cart is that I have to create a fake inventory so that people can order my digital products. Another problem is that when I sell software, I would like the payment processed and then a download link made available to get the software. This option may be available in Zen Cart, but I haven’t found it yet.

I brought this issue up with Mitchell Harper, the lead developer for StoreSuite NX shopping cart software at Interspire on the their blog. His response was,

StoreSuite was built from day one to support physical and downloadable products. If you only sell downloadable products the shipping step in the checkout process is skipped.

StoreSuite will have a customer area where your customers can login and download their digital products (eBooks, MP3’s, etc) and you can even add expiry dates to the downloads.

Basically *EVERYTHING* is automated - from checkout, to email, to product downloads. Hope that helps.

That does help. StoreSuite seems to be built with the modern, web-based business in mind. I was considering writing my own shopping cart to handle my unique requirements, but this is not something I’m really interested in doing. Creating web applications like this is not a part of my software development goals.

StoreSuite has many other useful features. You can rearrange items by drag and drop and easily customize the site. Interspire created a video showing this feature. Templates are also used for the shopping cart and they can be customized.

Payments can be made through credit cards, PayPal, 2Checkout, and Worldpay. Inventory can also be tracked and there is integration with the major shipping providers.

The shopping cart is still under development and hopefully a beta version will be available for testing soon. The interesting thing about the software is that it uses AJAX technology which I haven’t seen used in other shopping carts. This definitely will enhance the experience in using and maintaining it.

StoreSuite is a commercial application, unlike the free and open source osCommerce and Zen Cart. This shouldn’t be a factor in considering whether or not to use it. Its better to spend money on software that does what you need to do as opposed to getting free software that falls short of your requirements.

You can follow the development of StoreSuite on The StoreSuite Blog.

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