Notes on One E-Commerce System

For the small web design shop, getting asked to produce an e-commerce site is often somewhat of a challenge. There are countless ways it can be done, and sometimes just choosing the right shopping cart software, payment gateway and merchant account can be a big job.

For very small shops, I definitely recommend considering PayPal's e-commerce solutions. Once the site owner has a PayPal Business Account, you can literally have an online shop up and running in a matter of hours.

For the larger projects, I have yet to settle on a single solution, but I've been reasonably pleased with a system that was chosen by one of my clients, Web Marketing Magic. I was initially turned off by the "internet hustle" feel to their web site, as well as by the poor design of the pages, but the software itself has always worked well for us. And in the couple of years that we've been using it, it has improved noticeably on both of those counts.

WMM is a hosted product which provides not just a shopping cart, but a range of marketing features, including an email database and autoresponder system. There are several packages providing different feature sets; we've been using the somewhat expensive Pro package because of our need to provide digital delivery of goods.

WMM has generally worked well for us. Because it was not my decision to use it, I have always been tempted to try and convince my client to try a set of other solutions instead: a PayPal shopping cart, Payloadz, and Constant Contact or MailChimp. But my client is convinced that the integration WMM offers between its shopping cart and autoresponder system is crucial to the sales process, and she may turn out to be right.