Excerpt of an April 2009 Article about ProductCart

Here we profile ProductCart, by Early Impact, Inc. Based in Mission Viejo, Calif., the company offers the licensed cart for a starting price of $695 with optional add-ons. We interviewed co-owner Massimo Arrigoni about the cart.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Arrigoni: “ProductCart is a licensed shopping cart. We started in 2001, and we’re currently shipping version 3.51. Several thousand licenses have been sold.”

PeC: What are the cart's biggest strengths?

Arrigoni: “Eight years of development based on a constant stream of customer feedback, which translates into a feature depth that is hard to find in other shopping carts. It also means that we have had the opportunity to implement approved integrations with FedEx, UPS, eBay, QuickBooks, Google Website Optimizer, Google Checkout and dozens of other systems.”

“For companies that sell custom-made or configurable products and services, our ‘Build To Order’ version with conflict management can provide solutions to problems that are hard to solve. A quick example: Being able to provide online quotes for catered events where some of the prices change dynamically based on the number of guests, and some don’t, such as a fixed price for the jazz band, but variable food costs."

PeC: What are some of its weaknesses?

Arrigoni: “Multi-lingual support. The feature set is so broad that to make everything from custom search fields to gift wrapping options available in multiple languages would require substantial changes to the system architecture. So it’s an area where we simply say, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t do it.’”

PeC: What plans do you have for future cart development?

Arrigoni: “We asked our users what they were missing. It’s incredible the amount of smart features they came up with. We haven’t made final decisions on everything that will make it into the next release, but we can say that ProductCart v4 (coming in September 2009), will have a slick, AJAX-powered one-page checkout, more sales and coupon management features, stronger content management tools and lots more features.”

PeC: How specifically would switching to ProductCart improve a merchant's business?

Arrigoni: “I’d say three areas: It can solve business problems other shopping carts can’t solve, such as the Build To Order system mentioned above. It contains a lot of time-saving administration tools that can really make the difference on a day-to-day basis, such as automatic synchronization with QuickBooks. And it provides storefront features that can improve the customer experience, such as AJAX-enhanced search that makes for quicker, friendlier searches in the store catalog.”

PeC: Any other thoughts for our readers?

Arrigoni: Your needs may change over time. Go with an ecommerce system that can change (i.e., be customized) as your needs change. Choose robust, proven software like ProductCart that’s been successfully put to the test for years.

Read the Full Article in Practical eCommerce - Cart of the Week: ProductCart