One of the areas that we do no like reinventing the wheel on is shopping carts. If a client comes to use wanting an ecommerce site/shopping cart we will research one of the many good options, make a recommendation, and help get them up and running. There are just too many good companies with a lot of good options out there. And they deserve every dime they get.
Our latest venture – find a new shopping cart for BatteryFuel. We moved BatteryFuel to a Yahoo! shopping cart about 3 years and it was a big step up from what they had before. But over the years we have found that Yahoo! just does not allow much in terms of back end development (i.e. there is NO API for programming). For design/customization it also requires you to learn their proprietary language called RTML. No thanks – they’ve had enough. Time to shop and move on.
We narrowed it down to Big Commerce and Volusion, and we have settled on Volusion because – again – their API. The Big Commerce API is output only, while the Volusion API is input and output. Yay for them
Well we have just signed up for the biggest cart that Volusion has and we will start to play with their API and mass importing of products (50000+). Stay tuned to learn if/how Volusion can handle this project.
Our new forums are up at http://forum.getyourwebsitetoday.com/ for more discussion on this issue. Feel free to jump right in!