How I set up a shopping cart in one afternoon

I don’t believe it’s worth the time and money to create a custom ecommerce software just for my needs. Therefore, I decided to check out the Ashop Commerce and see what this shopping cart software can offer.

I signed up for a 10 days test drive and here are mine conclusions:

Site usability. Found all the info I needed in 17 minutes. Nice intro video and FAQ page gave me all the answers I needed. Fast.

Procedures. Easy and simple: After filling in the form with some basic personal information, I received an email with links to my store and Admin Panel and login credentials.

Support. Live chat support, user forums, tutorial movies, user manual, e-mail.

Site customization. System offers a number of templates that can be customized to the detail. Customization of the site is all about click-drag-drop. Easy.

Setting up the products. Setting up products for the shopping cart is just a matter of filling in the form and uploading the images. Each of the form fields comes with the interactive help button. Apart from standard fields like “Title”, “Short description” there are "Our price” and "Retail price" fields. Each product can be marked as: "Homepage special" and "Category special". You can even run an inventory on products.

For digital products, there is a "Digital product" checkmark and “Add new product keys” field. Useful.

Marketing features. Apart from SEO optimization, it includes affiliate program management, banner and link exchange management, newsletter management and products feeds and reviews. In addition, their team is also working on a Customer Relationship Management and Return on Investment modules that will be added to the package soon. Also, Affiliate mass payment function through PayPal, invoice printing function, gift certificates, discount coupons, Google sitemap generator ...

Pricing. Monthly cost of that eStore starts at 89$. From what I saw, this option suits my needs. It includes all the features you might need when setting up an eStore. It supports 500 products which is more that enough for me.

Conclusion. To sum it all up, I heard about this company for the first time Saturday morning. Went for coffee, shopping and lunch. Started to work on it at 4:32PM and by 10:00PM I had my own Internet Store on line. (Did I mention that in the mean time I even took a break for a soccer match that I just had to watch on TV?)