Ecommerce in a box
July 21st, 2007One thing which many of my clients require is an online shopping cart. When they ask for this functionality I am usually caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Ecommerce software is expensive and usually difficult to skin or configure. Free ecommerce software is available but the functionality is usually limited and the styles are again difficult to alter and it becomes uneconomical from my perspective to spend hours tweaking the UI.
As such, I was interested to be asked to review Ashop Commerce, shopping cart software produced by an Australian ecommerce software provider. At first glance, Ashop is like many other large players in the ecommerce software market. However with its web interface, it combines the flexibility of updating products and prices from anywhere you like via your web browser with the reliability you would expect from a major software house.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any clients in Australia. If I did however, I’d consider recommending that they try this software first, rather than getting a designer like myself to build a cart. You may think that this would be doing myself out of business, but it is always my belief that if a product is good and benefits the client then I will recommend it. I find that this builds a lot of trust with clients who may then come to you for other pieces of work.
Ashop seems to have all of the major bases covered, right down to the (usually) highly annoying task of creating thumbnails for product images. Some software requires you to do this manually and can have you tearing your hair out. Good luck to them I say. To any Australian visitors to the site, I say take a look at Ashop Commerce ecommerce software.
