I was reading an article recently on Open Forum entitled “tips for adding eCommerce to your business.” Although I found the article entertaining as it did have some valuable tips for adding eCommerce to your business I found it sorely lacking in that it didn’t really provide anything substantive on HOW to add eCommerce to your business. That got me to thinking. If I was new to all of this and I was thinking about adding eCommerce to my business where do I start, how do I do it? There are a ton of eCommerce solutions available and making the right decision and then figuring it all out can be a daunting task.

I don’t want to get into the intricacies and details of all of the available eCommerce solutions nor make this a review of them but for the purposes of this post I will speak about the solution we offer our clients and why.

First, I will start with the “why.”

When it comes to eCommerce solutions, in my experience there is no one solution that is the magical answer. What this means is that in all of our many years of working with eCommerce and researching and/or using virtually all of the solutions out there none of them are perfect. Each one has something the matter with it in our opinion.

For our customers we need something that is reasonably easy to use and learn, offers most if not all of the bells and whistles a proprietor AND a potential customer or customer might want or need, is extensible, is reasonably secure with latest industry practices, is PCI compliant, and is inexpensive.

With that in mind, the solution we offer to our customers is Zen-Cart. We have numerous reasons for this. Because it is open-source software we have access to all of the design code and can modify it as needed. Since the software is free we can help a new small business get up and running quickly for minimal cost. The software is PCI compliant so we don’t have to be overly concerned about security issues. There is a ton of support available via a robust and significant forum with many people willing to provide advice and help that have extensive experience with the software. We can easily customize the software to the individual needs of the customer. Our customers, many of which are not technically proficient,  find it quick and easy to learn there way around the software. In an nutshell, it does pretty much everything it needs to do for us and for our customers and is a very inexpensive solution to quickly add eCommerce to their business. SO if you are looking for an eCommerce solution I recommend you consider Zencart.