You’ve just finished eating dinner, your husband wants to talk to you about his day at work, the kids are demanding your attention, and you’ve got to make a decision: Should you purchase the Shop Kit Plus, or go with a free shopping cart like OScommerce, Zen Cart or Agora Cart.

At first blush, it seems like a no-brainer.

OScommerce, Zen Cart and Agora Cart are free. You don’t have to shell out any money to acquire them and you can do the installation yourself. Or ask the nearest 15-year-old.

These carts also sport some features that Shop Kit Plus doesn’t, including a built-in shopping cart system (SKP is actually an online catalog script that uses Mals Ecommerce as a backend cart), multiple languages, email or newsletter systems, customer login, product reviews and lists of what other customers ordered.

It’s not until after you’ve setup your site and are deep into the process of building your busineses’ online home that you come face-to-face with the drawbacks of these systems.

Drawbacks of the free/open-source shopping carts

1. If something weird starts happening, or you have trouble figuring out what you are doing, your only recourse is research documentation that is written by and for developers and is hard to understand by normal people or wait for one or more of the volunteers on the support forums associated with the product to have time to answer your questions.

This is assume that you’ve figured out on your own that whatever problem you are having is with the software, not your hosting account. And if it’s with your hosting account, you’ll be lucky to have a host who is familiar enough with the software to know that it’s not the software causing the problem. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place in your quest for answers.

With the Shop Kit Plus, you have reliable support. We have more than 30 technicians who are paid to help you troubleshoot your hosting and Shop Kit Plus problems. We have also spent hundreds of hours putting together printable manuals, forums, a knowledgebase and now the Watersweb Shops Articles to help you setup and maintain your online shop. I also have a financial stake in keeping you happy. The Shop Kit Plus developer has a stake in keeping you happy.

2. Free is not all it’s cracked up to be. With the “free” carts, you will also need an SSL certificate to provide a secure connection for your clients to check out. With the SKP and Mals, that secure connection is already provided. Not to mention, the people in charge of making sure that connection is secure, and that any data stored in a database is complete secure and encrypted are experts in that specific technology. A general web hosting company technician who services thousands of general sites is not going to be an ecommerce security expert.

3. Shop Kit Plus was developed with ease of use in mind. While it does have many of the backend features such as multiple shipping, taxation and payment options, our goal was to keep it easy to use, easy to customize and easy to work with.

You will not have to edit 10 different templates to change the way your navigation bar appears. You will not have to heavily modify the cart in order to fit your existing design into it. Simply create your design (or use a free template, a WAHM-built template or a custom web design), plug our site codes, and your site is built. Adding your products, categories, options and pages is as simple as filling out web forms.

The aforementioned carts are heavy on complex features — and hard to use, in my experience and in the experience of my clients who have tried them and left. The learning curve tends to be steeper on these products than on the Shop Kit Plus.

4. After five years experience and trying everything I can find to fit my needs and the needs of my WAHM physical product sellers, I have decided that it is best to recommend that you rely on experts for the ecommerce features that your business is built on. I’m not against open source software (as a matter of fact, I embrace software packages such as Wordpress). However, I recognize that there are some open source products that, in my opinion, are too much of a hassle to make it them worth the few dollars you will save.

5. With this in mind, I’d like to recommend some of the services that I use to promote my business, and that you can use to promote yours:

• Email Marketing: Aweber
• Merchant Account: E-Onlinedata
• Blogging: Wordpress (Can be installed via your Watersweb cPanel)

My Recommendation

Overall, in my opinion, if you are good with code and you enjoy playing with, modifying and working on your site, then zen, Agora or OScommerce might be right up your alley. Or they might be right for you if you can hire someone to customize the cart and maintain it for you.

My point is that these carts have their place.

But if you are wanting a simple ecommerce and hosting solution that will get the job done, with reliable support, easy to use features, multiple shipping and payment options, and a highly customizable front end, I recommend you consider Shop Kit Plus.