There are many shopping cart systems out there. From paid ones, such as the ProStores system to open source ones such as Zen-cart. And while many people like the fact that open source software is generally free, they don’t like the fact that there isn’t an organized support system available.
On the other hand, while there is organized support for commercial systems one has to decide if paying for such a system is right for them.
In this review we look at one of those paid systems – ProStores.
After you create your ProStores account and log in you are presented with your control panel:
It is here where you manage your store, see what’s sold or just learn more about the system.
When you select “Store Administration” you are presented with a few options including your template and inventory manager, payment manager (deciding what types of payments to accept and so on), and a snapshot of your store’s performance:
As you can see, the snapshot shows your pending orders, orders ready for shipping, best customer and so on.
Along the left side of the page is the site menu:
This menu is where everything happens with your site. As you can see it includes an entry for editing your page templates (under store design), an entry for managing your store settings and more.
Adding page templates is quite easy. Using a combination of HTML and ProStores “tags” you can design the look of the site to be how you want it.
If you already have an existing site you can also easily import it into the template manager. ProStores even offers a plugin for Dreamweaver to make your template management easy.
Templates are provided, or can be created, for your home page as well as any other main pages you need, product and category pages and even order processing and confirmation pages.
Within the “Store Settings” menu is where you define things such as payment preferences (i.e which credit cards will you accept. Will you accept PayPal? Money Orders? Payment on Delivery? Etc.)
It is also here where you define sales tax information, shipping information and product promotions you may wish to set up.
Essentially all your day-to-day store management tasks take place within this one screen, using this menu.
How search friendly is it?
A common problem with many e-commerce solutions is that they are not very search engine friendly because they are database driven. ProStores has taken this into consideration and has provided a way to make your product URLs more search friendly.
Under the “Product” > “Market Demand” menu you will find an SEO menu:
Simply enabling all the check boxes turns on search engine friendly URLs.
Granted they aren’t the most optimized URL’s but at least they will help get your product pages indexed.
Further, you can add tags for descriptions, keywords and title tags so that when you add or change a product, the changes are mimiced in the <head> tag.
What is ProStores support like?
In addition to providing support, because it is a hosted commercial solution, there is a large ProStores user community which helps to provide tips and tricks for your store.
For example, are you looking for a way to implement Google Analytics conversion tracking? You’ll find the answer in the ProStores large knowledge base.
And if you need more support, there are plenty of firms out there to provide paid support. Some firms specialize in templates for ProStores whilc some offer SEO and other promotion services.
Conclusion
If you are new to the area of e-commerce and don’t really know where to go then I’d suggest ProStores as an option for you. It is a nicely bundled service offering domain hosting, e-commerce solution and support all rolled up into one monthly fee.
Of course if you are little more resourceful or are on a fixed budget perhaps something that requires more of your time and input would be better suited.
However if you prefer just to let someone else handle the details while you worry about buying and selling product, then ProStores may be for you.
