E-Commerce Shopping Cart Solutions

With online sales accounting for an ever increasing share of retail, you need a reliable and knowledgeable company working with you rather than simply renting you server space. Setting up a shop using one of the many off the shelf shopping carts is relatively easy and costs little or nothing. Choosing the right one, configuring it properly, getting the on-site SEO right and making it fast is considerably harder, and without those things the rest of the effort is wasted.

Choosing the right platform

There is no single best shopping cart, only the one that best fits what you sell, how much of it, and how you want to work. The four we see most often among our clients each suit a different situation.

CubeCart is a dedicated shopping cart that is quick to learn, light on server resources and capable of scaling to very large catalogues. It suits store owners who want to sell rather than to assemble a system.

WooCommerce turns an existing WordPress site into a shop. It is the obvious choice if you already publish content in WordPress and want the shop in the same place.

OpenCart is straightforward to set up and includes multi-store as standard, which very few carts do without an extension.

Magento is the heavyweight option, right for complex catalogues, multiple currencies and trade pricing, and unnecessary for anything simpler.

We host all four, plus any other PHP and MySQL based system, so our recommendation is not shaped by what we happen to sell.

The things that actually decide whether a store succeeds

Software choice matters far less than most people expect. The recurring problems we see are the same regardless of platform.

• Speed. Slow category and search pages cost sales directly, and on a shop the cause is almost always database work on an oversold server.
• Checkout friction. Every additional required field, forced account registration and unexpected shipping cost loses a percentage of the customers who reached that page.
• Payment setup. The wrong gateway costs money on every single order, and a badly implemented one loses sales at the worst possible moment.
• Shipping configuration. Getting zones, weights and rates right is unglamorous and is the source of a great many support tickets and refunds.
• Emails that arrive. Order confirmations landing in spam because SPF and DKIM were never configured properly is far more common than it should be.

Specialist e-commerce hosting

Our e-commerce hosting plans run only on our better servers, configured and tuned for high volume MySQL throughput rather than for fitting as many accounts on as possible. That is a deliberate commercial choice: a shop is not a brochure site and should not be hosted like one.

We have specialised in CubeCart since 2007 and our CubeCart hosting includes free CubeCart support. We also offer Magento hosting on semi-dedicated plans as well as on dedicated servers for larger clients.

What we offer

Havenswift Hosting have always provided a full range of e-commerce services, from pre-sales consultancy through to ongoing support after launch.

• Pre-sales consultancy and advice on the solution best suited to your business
• Custom programming for specific functionality, or for the skin and look and feel
• Implementation support, and migration expertise if you are moving from one package to another
• Specialist hosting, on our e-commerce shared hosting plans or on your own dedicated server
• E-commerce package support
• Payment gateway selection, integration and testing
• Search engine optimisation, and advice on pay per click
• Day to day technical management, so you can get on with running the customer facing side of your business

If you are at the stage of deciding what to build, or you have a store that is not performing and you are not sure why, that is exactly the conversation to have with us before spending money.