[Hidden-tech] Good shopping cart/affiliate package?

[Daniel Fried]

Are you stuck on a service?  Or would you use a software package with
separate hosting?

Do you have a technology bias?  Are you going to do development yourself or
hire someone?  (or use a pre-existing templated system?  Even those usually
require some development to make them exactly what you want, the biggest
E-Commerce project I ever worked on was setting up an online service, and I
just worked on the templates).

I've used a ColdFusion based system called CFWebstore (www.cfwebstore.com) a
lot.  It's got a ton of features, it's cheap but commercially supported
($400 one time fee, and you get all the source code) and I've had great luck
with very heavy customization.  You can also get a lot of mileage out of
open source solutions, but you'll want to look at the out-of-the-box feature
set.  Sometimes the open source solutions require a lot of integration and
know-how to make everthing work cleanly.

I like CFWebstore because its' a complete system as is, and can be
implemented with almost no serious development.  It has very
robustmembership management (selling and manual group membership) and
mailing list features along with the ability to sell other things from
physical goods to electronic downloads to online gift certificates.  It also
has a very strong discount/promotion system, affiliate management, gift
registries, product reviews (with controls over how to handle them),
multiple shipping calculation options, payment options for everything from
wait-for-a-check, to merchant account integration for most gateways, to
real-time paypal integration.  It also has an integrated CMS and file
manager so once it's set up you never need to go into the code.

-Dan

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Stefan Gonick
<stefan at databasewebworks.com>wrote:

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>
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I've been searching for a good system to handle selling products and good
> affiliate software.
> Ideally, the system would also including full email list services as an
> all-in-one package.
>
> The one that I have been looking at in depth is 1shoppingcart.com, which
> costs $99/month.
> On the surface they do it all. They provide a shopping cart, affiliate
> software, and email list
> management. However, when you look at the details, you discover that each
> of the 3 modules
> are weak, though the affiliate module is pretty good. The email module is
> quite weak.
>
> Here are some of the limitations in 1shoppingcart that are important to me:
>
> 1. There is no way for a customer to cancel monthly billing without
> contacting me.
> This is bad for doing monthly membership sites. I need a system where the
> customer
> can cancel their monthly payments, and the software send information to an
> URL that
> I specify in order to notify the membership site software.
>
> 2. There are no 1-click up-sells/cross-sells. This is where someone makes a
> purchase,
> and you are able to offer them another product that can be added to their
> existing order
> without having to checkout again. This is a very important feature.
>  1shoppingcart plans
> to add this capability "soon", but there is no telling when that will
> happen.
>
> There are some other limitations that I need, but I'm forgetting what they
> are at the moment.
>
> Is there anything really good out there? What are people's
> recommendations/experiences?
>
> Does anyone have any experience with Quick Pay Pro?  Their specs are
> better, but I
> can't find any current reviews. I can only find a couple of very old ones
> that were negative.
>
> Thanks!
> Stefan
>
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