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You need to know which among the many list of things to consider when choosing a shopping cart software you should put in your list of priorities. This will help you have a better guide when you start hunting for the template that you would use for your ecommerce business.

1. Balancing simplicity and the features that the sopping cart solution offers. This is like the yin-yang for web sites. Always maintain a balance between the two, always making sure that none of the two gets more than the other. Features are around because they make websites more enticing. They can make your website more interesting. However, you need to make sure that you do not overload your site with too much stuff. It will make uploading very difficult especially for computers that are not so high-end and Internet connections that are slow. This is where simplicity comes in. Just choose those features that can actually be of use to your website and your online store. Those that the customers would appreciate and can actually help improve your site.
2. Check how efficient the customer service and documentation are. There is nothing more troublesome than your shopping cart template going nuts and you do not know what to do with it. Thus, it is very important to have a very reliable support system from your manufacturer’s end. The customer service should be very easy to contact and the response should be immediate. You do not want to feel like a sitting duck when everything starts to look as if they are falling apart.
3. Making the shopping cart template compliment your online store’s web design. What is more frustrating than purchasing a shopping cart template that you cannot install in your web site? Or, if it can be integrated, you experience a lot of problems? You need to make sure that all the features in your shopping cart software can be viewed properly in your site, like how the thumbnails zoom when the mouse is hovered on it, or how your website can be crawled and indexed by search engines, and the likes.

These are but the basics of the lists that you have to consider when choosing a shopping cart template for your site. Simple as they are, they can make wonders for your online business.

Open source ecommerce systems are created by individuals or companies that want to give something back to the community. They are available to anyone to use for free, even for commercial use. Now just because they are free doesn’t mean they are limited or less powerful in any ways when compared to the paid packages. In fact, big companies have used them to build their ecommerce store that’s doing millions of transactions per day.

If you do a bit of search you will find many available. But the ones that worth considering are OScommerce, PrestoShop, Magento and Joomla. These are made specifically for ecommerce use, apart from the last one, therefore everything you need is there right out of the box. The most complicated thing you will do is installing the system. In simple terms, they are just php scripts. If you have installed one before then you are already 98% there. The installation process is more or less the same with all four open source ecommerce systems. So once you’ve done it once, you will be able to install the others with ease.

It’s worth spending some time playing and testing as many systems as you can to find one the suits you. Before you commit to one it’s important to consider the level support that is available for that system. This is very important for an open source application. So do visit the community area and do some search on web to see how many “fan sites” you can find, and how useful they are. Visit some forums that dedicated to each one to read about people’s issues and solutions to understand the advantages and disadvantages of them. You will also need to consider things like SEO and design customization. Even though all four of these systems have a template system in place, but not all are the same. If you have some knowledge of web programming you should dig deep into the codes and maybe even try to customize it. The truth is that no one ecommerce system is perfect, so you need to weight up and priorities your requirements and use that as a guideline when making the final decision.