I just spent an hour or two having a play with version 3.5 of Interspire Shopping Cart. I have to say, this is the single most polished product I’ve ever used. All products have their pros and cons, but for sheer polish, from the AJAX powered search box, to the amazing design mode (click through for short video demo), this product oozes style.

Lots of nice touches like a built in logo creator (ok, not great for us all, but useful for some), very easy to use site designer, extremely easy to integrate third party products such as Google Analytics, Live Person chat, and a third party affiliates program. The CMS, while not a full blown CMS, is better than than 90+% of the shopping carts out there. Their support for product variations, and inventory tracking for product variations, is probably the best I’ve seen.

I have to admit this one has flown under my radar a bit (despite being a local company - I’m also in Sydney. Sorry Interspire!), but they are a sleeping giant. Definitely makes my short list of products to consider.

My post on Magento a while ago got a bit of interest, which wasn’t a huge surprise. There’s a lack of well made open source shopping carts out there and so the prospect of a new player is very promising to many people.

And that’s what I thought Magento was: just another shopping cart, albiet open source. A play with Magento in the last few days has made me think otherwise.

On the surface, it does seem like just another cart. I think they’ve probably done that on purpose. Once you dig beneath the surface a bit, things start to look a bit different. Magento isn’t just another cart. This is a real enterprise application.

I don’t pretend to know Magento inside and out, but here’s four things I’ve seen so far that makes me believe that Magento has aspirations beyond competing with osCommerce and all the < $1,000 shopping carts.

1. Sophisticated themes support. Skins are skins, right? Some are easy and some are hard? Nope. Take a good look at Magento’s themeing engine. Support for theme over rides & definining templates to use at a product/category level puts it at a high level.
2. Cacheing. Lots of shopping carts have no cacheing at all, others have it implemented in a fairly crude way. Magento seems to have quite sophisticated, granular, and controllable cacheing out of the box.
3. Data integration features. Integrating with external data sources is almost inevitable in the enterprise - getting data in, or out, or both. Magento has these features built in.
4. Multiple levels of shops. Magento can support multiple shops in one install. This can be at different levels - multiple completely independent shop fronts, or more interestingly, multiple shop fronts with a shared check out.

The interesting thing is I suspect some of these features, in particular the themeing, might get a bit of backlash from the casual open source script kids who can’t understand the value of the extra complexity they need to get through to get the job done.

A few months old now, but I just saw a great feature from Product Cart. It’s an ecommerce widget.

Basically, you log into your shopping cart admin interface, generate a widget based on your requirements, featuring particular products, you can then embed that widget into third party websites - blogs, social networking applications, other websites, etc. It can also be used to include affiliate links, which I’m sure your affiliates will love.

Great feature, a good way to spread your products outside of your site. Well done to the team at Early Impact for some innovative thinking.

I’ve been chatting with Jean-Noel who is behind Shoopz, a new hosted shopping cart. It’s still well and truly beta, so I haven’t got an entry on this site yet, but it seems to be a bit different from the standard approach. He has a very visual skinning approach which is a bit different from normal (no way to rearrange boxes yet, but he assures me this is coming!)

Still quite a way from release, but one to keep an eye on, a bit of innovation is always a good way to stir up some competitive action.

Most ecommerce sites are using Adwords. I manage AdWords account on behalf of several clients. Frankly, I’ve never really liked the AdWords interface. I always dreaded going in there and, like it or not, as humans, we are less inclined to do things we hate.

I recently downloaded the Google Adwords Editor. This is a program you download to manage your adwords account(s) in (yes, it works with master accounts for those who have them, a godsend for me). You import your account in, make the changes offline, then when you are happy you sync it back up.

What’s it like? It’s amazing. Every now and then you bump into a piece of software that just works exactly how you think it should. This is one of them. No, it’s not perfect, there are a few things I’d like to change, but overall it’s wonderful. I’ve spent the last few hours over hauling the largest account I manage, and it’s been so easy to do. I’m absolutely convinced that when I go back in a few weeks time to check out the results of these changes, the client’s sales will have gone up at least 10%. I suspect if I were doing it via the web interface I wouldn’t have made quite so many tweaks, and probably not gotten as good a result.

I love it! Well done Google Adwords Editor team!

One of the frustrating things about being a new site is that new sites rank poorly in Google. This is doubly frustrating for ecommerce sites who often rely on Google organic traffic for a lot of their sales.

In the SEO community, it’s widely accepted that new domains are penalized in search engines (e.g. receive poor rankings) for approximately 6 - 8 months. There’s little that can be done about this. In fact, sometimes doing aggressive SEO work in that period can make it longer. This  is called the aging delay.

If you want to minimise this damage, the best steps are:

• Register the domain as soon as you can
• Put up a one page site, with a brief explanation as to what it is/will be. It doesn’t need a pretty design, just something basic, as long as it contains a few good keywords so Google understands what the page/domain is about.
• Get the site one or two links - beg your friend, your brother’s blog, etc. The links are so Google can discover the site and start the clock running to age your domain.

Given most sites take a few months to build, it’s a good way to minimize the painful waiting period.

As the owner of this site, I often get asked “which is the best shopping cart?”. I also hang out in a few forums where shopping cart software is frequently discussed: “what is the best shopping cart software for my new online frozen banana stand?” etc.

Well, once and for all, I’ll answer the question as to which is best:

It depends.

Sorry folks, I know you are looking for a simple answer, but there is no simple answer to complex questions. What does it depend on?

• What are you selling?
• What sort of complexity do your products have?
• What is your marketing strategy?
• What is your branding strategy?
• What are your in house technical skills like?
• What is your budget?

I talk to and consult with a lot of ecommerce owners. Everyone thinks their store is pretty normal and pretty straight forward. They aren’t. Every single customer has at least one challenge, one unique attribute to their business which I hadn’t seen before/considered before. To them, and for their business, it seems like no big deal.

There are certain shopping carts I would absolutely not recommend to anyone, and there’s a short list of 4 or 5 products which would meet the bulk of the needs of probably 80% of people without major customization. (and before I get deluged with comments saying “what is your short list?”, I’m afraid I won’t blog it as I do need to keep a certain level of neutrality as owner of this site).

The most important thing (which I’m sure Scott blogged about sometime but I can’t find it)  is to “work on your  shop, not on your shopping cart”.

Great news from the Inside AdWords blog: Google Conversion Optimizer is launched. For those of you not clear on this, let’s take a brief look at history. Early ads were all CPM based - pay per 1,000 impressions. This is still popular, and Google supports it. Overture and then Google revolutionized the industry with CPC - cost per click ads, which virtually all ecommerce sites use today.

Most people are also familiar with affiliates, where you pay someone for referring a customer to you if that results in a sale.

Google Adwords now supports CPA - cost per acquistion, which is a hybrid of the above. What happens is you bid how much you are prepared to pay for acquiring a customer (which in my opinion is the single most important metric for marketing). You say “I am prepared to pay up to $5 for every sale my advertising generates”. Google tracks your sales, and runs your campaigns at a frequency, and using targetting that results in you paying no more than $5 sale.

The downside for small shops is you need a minimum of 200 sales/month via AdWords in order to join in the program,  but that’s reasonable (if not slightly annoying for many).

I just helped a client switch payment gateways. At the moment the switch from old to new happened, she started to spontaneously dance around the office singing “ding dong! The witch is dead”. I suspect this may be a failure in customer service on the part of the old gateway

Gateways are one of those things that don’t seem important till they don’t work well, then they are VERY important…

I heard about Internet Retailer’s publication Guide to Retail Web Site Design & Usability and so put out the cash to buy it.

It’s a magazine format publication that weighs in at 264 pages, including ads. It’s not too ad heavy fortunately - maybe only 20 pages or less.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed. For $50 there’s quite a range of books I could get which would offer no end of value. This is magazine format, but it’s also magazine style. Much of the deep content is written by vendors. For example, there’s a three page article about using video to enhance ecommerce written by - guess who - a CEO of a company supplying video services. To their credit, the articles are well written and not advertorials. However, take a guess what the conclusion of the article is - is video good or bad? I’ll leave it up to you to decide on that.

There is also a lot of “case studies”. They are indeed case studies, but lack any sort of meaningful analysis. The case studies almost invariably start with what they did (eg deploy an open source solution, add page features, create a social networking environment, etc) and attempt to draw broad conclusions from that. There is no meaningful analysis at all, and no attempt to try and relate multiple similar case studies. What would have been useful would be “three companies embarked on similar projects, here’s the three approaches they took and how the outcome differed as a result”. Once again, they are written in a journalistic style.

About 120 pages are a “features and functions of the top 500″, showing a breakdown of the top 500 internet retailers. There’s not much insight here, just facts and figures, most readily available (although not all - it does include session length which I found interesting).

That’s followed by another 40 pages of listing vendors broken down by category (CMS, tracking, etc). Top that off with 20 pages with even more filler: lists of interesting books, glossary and a supplier directory, you’re left with a distinct feeling of “where’s the beef?”

Overall, it is probably of mild interest to some people, and it is only $49. Personally, I can’t see myself purchasing the 2009 edition.