If you've ever spent time trying to find a good shopping cart for your website, you'll know there are hundreds from which to choose, and the vast majority of them do not present the cart in a user-friendly format, and/or are missing important functionality.

To cut to the chase, we've been through the loop with a number of cart programs and we've finally found one that can give us everything we need for any client - VirtueMart.

VirtueMart is written on the popular open source platform and sits on a Joomla application/platform. That doesn't mean your entire website needs to be in Joomla, it does not.

If you've looked at VirtueMart and it's not for you, we can and have worked with other shopping carts, such as X-Cart, PDG Soft, Zen Cart and ProStores, so contact us if you have specific requirements.

If you're a relative novice you might be wondering with the large disparity in pricing for shopping cart work? - We've seen people offering a functional shopping cart for $200 and others offering what would appear to be the same for $5000+ The fact is that a developer can install a working version of VirtueMart, or X-Cart or whatever, in probably less than an hour. But when he/she hands over the keys to your new store, what exactly will you have?

Here's a few things to think about when looking at price -

1. How many products do you have in your catalog? 1? 5000? - it takes time to add products into the cart software and to configure them with price, options, weights, descriptions, images etc etc.
2. How do you want your customers to pay you? - There are many merchant services available, including PayPal Website Payments Pro. But each one requires configuring within your shopping cart so that the transaction is processed securely and the money ends up in your account. It takes time to complete this process.
3. How do you intend to ship your products? - If you plan to charge customers for shipping, what method and how should the costs be calculated? Setting up your store to communicate directly with USPS, or Fedex or UPS etc, takes time. Weights need to be accurate, package sizes etc. Then there's overseas shipping which is often excluded from real-time shipping rate calculations. Again, it takes time to setup.

Those are just a handful of tasks to be performed when setting up a new cart. Will all that be included in the $200 package? It's unlikely.

Contact us today for a competitive quotation on your specific needs. Send us a message outlining your requirements briefly and we'll get back with you ASAP