I'm planning on opening up an online store in the next month or two. I've been investigating my different options...have found MC, Yahoo stores, and other ecommerce template skins based on oscommerce. Please tell me why you choose MC! It seems more expensive than the other options. Thanks!

Yahoo charges you based on your revenue, dosen't.

Look out for that- as well as what hosting costs if you're a higher volume seller, or plan to be one.....

I have never heard of a person switching TO yah00 stores...only from. OScommerce is powerful, but you have to be an IT person to make it work. Since there is no company behind it, it also does not have CISP/PCI certification, which means you will need to do that on your own. OScommerce is not a realistic solution for most of us.

I chose MC because it appeared professional. I spoke to two Sales Staff Agents in the Chat program and was pleasantly surprised at the level of "niceness."

MC has a lot of "pros," but also quite a few "cons" (as I'm sure most shopping carts do). I came from a Miva background which has a steep learning curve so I hated it so MC -- at the time -- was refreshing.

Good luck with finding the cart suitable for your business.

I investigated a lot of ecommerce sites also... Not sure why I went with except that it seemed the easiest to navigate and looked most professional. It has it's pro's and cons but for the most part I'm happy.

I came from a yahoo store that I had open for 2 years prior. I do not regret the change. Its mostly all pros, but there are a few cons, mostly just things I don't understand right now for the most part. I'll save about $2500 this year with compared to the yahoo store, and countless hours of time building the site, and I am also ranking better in search engines now.

Because I like the color purple I think that's as good a reason as any.

We first found Stone Edge's Order Manager which we really needed. Then we picked what we thought fit us best from the list of shopping carts that worked with Order Manager.

Before that I had built our entire site myself in Frontpage using Storefront we just had a local guy as our webhost. Storefront kept upgrading and would quit supporting older versions. You had to pay for the upgrades and usually had to redesign your whole site each time.

I was worried about losing our SERP rankings by switching to MC but after 7 months with MC we are still right where we were.

Thanks to you all for your replies, it has given me insight. Is it easy to design your site to look different than everyone elses? Is it easy to take care of your orders and bank processing? Do you use MC's merchant processing? Is MC responsive to problems?

prs, is Stone Edge's Order Manager better than Quickbooks, in your opinion? Or does it do something different?

Thanks all!!

To me it depends on how many orders you are doing. We used Quickbooks for our first few years but it got to be too much work. Both MC and QB only allow you to do things one order at a time. i.e. printing each order, charging each order. Order Manager can process orders individually or in batches. It has greatly reduced our order processing time.

OM also sends e-mails, imports tracking numbers, handles backorders, returns and exchanges, credits and many other functions that QB can't do or doesn't do easily. QB also has a limit on the number of customers you can have that we ran into. It was a nightmare.

However, I still recommend QB's if you are just starting out. If you have 20 or more orders a day, I'd recommend spending the money on OM.

I was using 1shoppingcart at first, (currently using it now until I make the transition). I'm basically switching because 1shoppingcart doesn't let you use realtime shipping with PayPal Payments Pro. I would rather move to Yahoo Merchant Solutions but they don't accept international orders.

So basically with my situation MonsterCommerce was my last resort. I wouldn't try using this though if I didn't like the features.

From a design stand point I can give you my 2cents. I just actually wrote a long post about this so I will just shoot you the link to it. My post is either at the bottom or near it.

http://forums.monstersmallbusiness.com/ind...pic=13884&st=20

Hope this helps,

I'm not sure what design elements you are interested in changing, but if you know css, you can make your design look pretty much however you want to. I've seen some absolutely gorgeous sites. There is some functionality that you cannot change. We currently have a discussion going on about product page layouts that is standard, but we've requested some flexibility. So, I don't know really how to answer your question completely without knowing what specifically you're referring to to make your site "look different".

I use MC's merchant processing and it's worked well for me. No complaints.

MC has historically been very responsive to problems. I'm starting my fourth year with them (has it been that long?) and I've been happy overall. There have been issues and some bumps in the road, but in all fairness, you will find issues with any cart provider. I certainly cannot speak for MC, but I think future updates will be tested and QAed thoroughly before being released to minimize bugs and I do think it will be awhile before we see any new enhancements because they are focusing on the core software right now. I don't think that's a bad thing even though some of us are chomping at the bit for some new stuff. If you do decide to go with MC, you can expect dedicated people that are eager to provide a quality product.


I think it's a pretty good reason.

To add to what purplekitty said,

we use stone edge order manager. It has greatly improved the way we do business. It has streamlined our warehouse and shipping department, and it has made it easier for our finance department. If I remember correctly, we were a beta tester for the stone edge intergration. It did start out with problem, but now is a solid system.

Hmmm...okay, still wondering. Many on these boards seem to have a great deal of coding and SEO knowledge...why did you choose over doing it yourself and having control...for example, I just bought a template and am customizing it for my mother's brick and morter store...she's not into ecommerce yet. The place I got my template from also offers ecommerce templates with OScommerce. Why, if you have some coding knowledge, would you go with than with one of these templates? Is it ease of use? Thanks for your insight...

MC is easy to use, has 24/7 telephone tech support, many fellow merchants that use the software, a company with a staff of a 100 or more, etc. . .

We found our selves always programming or modifying code to do something we needed to add to our site. Something that wasn't included with the template. Was constantly asking myself, when will I be finished designing this website, should I be programming or marketing.

We have been with MC for 5 months, I must admit, I find myself spending more time on marketing, seo, product offering development, and offering better customer service, and hardly any time on programming, no more late nights learning php, javascript, and the like. When we don't know how to do something in MC, we call tech support or ask questions in this forum and get a timely, knowledgeable and experienced response.

We chose it many years ago when mc had a staff of about 3 really Steph was just a sales girl and the old owner was at the helm.
They were a lot of help back then.
Little did we know!

We looked for years for that "Perfect Cart"
And somehow stumbled across MC, after speaking with Steph one night for hrs we opted to go forward and switch to MC.

It does what we needed back then and in the future.

Can it be improved? Sure but all of our needs are different and we cannot all have that perfect one.

Yes pros & cons but they all do! and overall we are very happy.

Well said Dave. I agree completely.

We've been with for four years. The software fits our needs and then some. Compared to our last cart this is heaven.

Anne

I imagine it's about time someone from MonsterCommerce chimed in here in response to your posts. Thanks for all the positive PR.

Not every cart out there compares to ours. We recognize that there are other solutions and we are VERY pleased that you have chosen to do business with us. Our aim is to provide the best possible solution and service with our cart. More really great stuff is on the horizon for MonsterCommerce! We hope that you will continue to provide us with the great feedback regarding both the product and our service as we move forward in the future!

Chris

What great stuff?
When?

Thanks to ALL of you for taking the time to post to me! Macrick, you hit the nail on the head as to what I was trying to get at. I'm a beginner/intermediate DreamWeaver user, able to modify templates, and that's where I was getting hung up at in making my decision between OSCommerce and MC. I'm NOT a coder, and don't want to be, because I know it'll take all I can do in running my virtual shop. I would have gotten stuck with the template oscommerce coding, and I don't have time for that.

I think that I'm good to go then. Just have to get my mom's site up and running, then I'll check in with MC to set up my shop. THANKS again!

Justducky2

The good thing on M0nster is the basic learning curve is quick.
With the provided themes etc the basic site can be up and running in a short amount of time and as you learn can be modified if /as needed.

Overall still a good choice.

You definitely do not want to go with a shopping cart that requires you to program. I was not a coder either, before we were with MC, I found that every time I wanted to fix or add something, all of the support was geared towards programmers and getting tech support on the phone was not an option.

At , seems like they gear it towards the most basic user. When you do need to do some advanced type of stuff the 24/7 tech support is a help, but you also have these forums to ask questions. Seems like there are many people here who know more about coding and programming than you or I will ever.

You may need to learn a little bit of html programming with MC, but forget about the java script:emoticon(':bash:', 'smid_8').php, .asp, mysql, javascript, etc...

Because with we can do so much more than we were doing without it. I am not saying they are perfect, no one solution is, but it definatly has taken us to "the next level". I am hopful that they will start to add functions again that will again allow us to get to "the next level" again.

I am also thinking of switching to MC as I have two stores now, one of StoresOnline (gasp) and another on Yahoo. I am basically sick and tired of programming into the wee hours of the morning and also sick of the crappy service from SOL.

I definitely see the benefits of MC, but a few of you have mentioned some cons (to be expected). Could you provide some more detail on these? I am not asking anyone to bash MC (unless you really want to), but I would like to be aware of limitations or bugs prior to making my decision.

Thanks
Todd

The software is generally good, but as a Canadian merchant, we only have two payment gateway options - Moneris and PayPal. This is just not acceptable. We had to cancel our account with today. Too bad, we were impressed with the tech support and overall ease of setting up our store. Figures that our store is COMPLETELY done and we can't get a payment gateway compatible with set up just because we are in Canada dealing with Canadian banks. What a waste...

Canadian merchants beware:
http://forums.monstersmallbusiness.com/ind...66&#entry109066


We've been with MonsterCommerce for less than a month. The design templates are ok, and will do for our new store until we learn more about store design and have the time to fiddle with settings and coding.

I have used Cartweaver, MIVA 4.0 and PayPal. Since January of this year, I have tested demos of six other "popular" shopping cart software and none of them impressed me at all. They were clunky, illogical and full of issues. Tech support was unbelievably useless.

Cartweaver and MIVA - clunky, not user friendly, buggy, horrible tech support, you must be an advanced techie to get basic features and designs to work properly. Not for a newbie at all.

PayPal - easy to set up, shopping cart has very limited shipping options, problems with Instant Payment Notiification for e-products, horrible tech support. PayPal known for suddenly freezing merchant accounts without notice, especially if your sales are high, leaving merchants unable to access their money. So, if you are successful online business, run away from PayPal as fast as you can.

MonsterCommerce is fairly easy to set up, some bugs as with any software, but tech and customer support have been outstanding so far. Cart has been fairly good, reliable, the odd glitch, but techs respond to forum posts and Trouble Tickets in a timely manner.

It's VERY hard to impress me these days, but I must admit, I've been spreading the word daily about MC.

I'm considering the MC product or better said one of my clients is I am already sold on it. However due to my customers budget constraints I'm also looking at several other packages. I'm wondering if any one has any good information for a small operation with 3 locations looking to give themselves a web presence including a web store with customer account viewing and payment options for recurring bills. Also I wanted to see if anyone has ever used a package called Managemore Econnect I have been doing an evaluation of it and so far seems very capable especially on the recurring billing side. Any information or experiences that could help in our decision making would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for all the help in advance

I went to Managemore's site - I am still considering alternatives with better backend support - but it took several attempts to get the LiveEval signup page to load - and it never did send me the link. Accordingly, they are sctratched from my list. If you can't make your presales process work flawlessly, you can't be taken seriously.

I am very much a newbie here and still don't understand a lot of things. But I have learned a lot from these forums.

I went with MC because it was recommended by a friend who knows a whole lot more than I do. She convinced me that MC would best suit my goals and plans for a website. And not understanding much about websites, I know even less about hosting and optimization, and rankings, etc. So I am glad that someone here knows these things.

While I am learning, this is the best place to be for me

I've been with almost since their start, under an different account. is very good, but dataport 5.0 is a horrible piece of S___oftware.. I'm setting up a test server with zen cart.. I"ll let you guys know how it compares, I"ll probably try OS commerce as well.. learning PHP right now...

Also 's HTML Catalog dosen't work if you have pictures hosted on another domain.

But I think has the most features of any cart out there, and is probably the most reliable, and expensive.

Agreed.