By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
February 20th, 1999

See Also   How to Choose a Shopping Cart   StoreSense Pro   Click and Build   eCongo Free Commerce   EasyCart   FreeMerchant   Merchant Planet   Merchant Manager   Yahoo! Store   MerchandiZer

Overall
EasyCart has many attractive features. In particular it is a very flexible package, allowing less knowledgeable merchants to build a good-looking store quickly while allowing savvier merchants to add in some fairly advanced features.

It's pricing is attractive too. Whilst the cost to purchase the package outright is dearer than the set-up costs of many of its competitors, EasyCart has one major advantage over them - there are no ongoing monthly costs.

No package is perfect of course and EasyCart does have its limitations. Most important amongst these are the inability to import an existing database; the difficulty in coping with offline orders or with payments by anything other than credit card; and the fairly rudimentary reporting provided.

Set Up
All functions of EasyCart are controlled from a simple, one-screen menu that in turn calls up a series of forms.

The first step in the set up process is the specification of options via the "Set user options" form. This allows merchants to specify global options such as HTML page headers and footers. The flexibility of EasyCart is demonstrated well here. The total Web newbie can ignore most of this form, relying on the EasyCart default values to produce a good looking store for them. However, the savvier merchant can choose to add HTML, images, JavaScript, Java or any embedded objects they wish.

The next step is the creation of catalogs or categories. This is again done using a simple form, with the merchant specifying the category name and a description along with any custom HTML that they might wish to add. EasyCart in theory supports an unlimited number of categories. However its creators recommend a maximum of 200 - this should be more than enough for most stores.

The final step is to define products for each category. Once more this is done via a simple form. EasyCart does a good job of importing product images and has a nice feature that allows merchants to specify both thumbnail and full size images. Another good feature is the number of options that can be added, for example colour and size. There are two categories of options available, those that have no impact on selling price and those that do. One drawback is that regardless of what options are specified the part number or SKU for the product remains unaltered.

In theory there can be up to 99 items in each category. However, EasyCart displays all items from a category on a single page so if too many were added the download speed would become painfully slow. EasyCart therefore recommend a maximum of 20 items per category.

Unfortunately, there is no ability to import data from an existing database. This means a lot of additional work for a merchant that has a large inventory of items to add to their Web store.

Also on the downside, the set-up program has the annoying habit of leaving you stranded. On many occasions after completing a form you are left on a page that has no links back to the main menu, the only way back being through extensive use of the back key.

There are however some useful features built in to the set up program - merchants can elect to have EasyCart create a home page for them and to have a store search engine built in to each page.

There is also excellent and abundant support provided. Online, there is a fully functional demo-store available to play with, a user manual, a tutorial and a pictorial walk through of the set up process. Further support is available via e-mail or a toll free telephone number.

The problem with using most demo stores is that all the work a merchant does when testing them is lost if they then decide to purchase the full package. EasyCart however comes with a great feature, the personal demo store. This allows merchants to build their own store free of charge and without any commitment. Should they then decide to purchase EasyCart, all the information they have entered is retained.

EasyCart scores well on price too. Merchants can purchase the program outright for $379 or $485 including real time credit card processing. This price includes installation of EasyCart on the merchant's own. A better option for many merchants will be to have their store hosted on EasyCart's server. This costs a modest $60 per year with the first year's hosting provided free.

Order processing
Like most commerce servers these days, EasyCart comes complete with a virtual shopping cart and all transactions are secured via Netscape's SSL protocol. Real-time credit card authorisation is an option with services being provided by Authorize.Net, Anacom or Processing.Net.

EasyCart is essentially designed around the principle that the customer will order online and pay online using credit cards. Merchants who want to accept orders offline or payment by other than credit card need to rely on adding text notes to the checkout form. For example, a merchant could include their snail-mail address and invite customers to print of the completed order form and mail it to them along with a check.

There is a good deal of flexibility available when setting shipping options. There are three global options available when the store is installed:

• Standard Shipping allows merchants to define up to three shipping options for example US Mail, Ground and International. Then, as each product is added to the store, they specify the shipping cost for each of these options.

• Ship by Price allows the merchant to define a sliding scale of charges determined by the purchase amount.

• UPS Tables automatically calculate the shipping cost based on the zip codes of the despatch point and the customer's delivery address.

Whatever method is chosen, EasyCart calculates the relevant shipping amount and adds it to the order total.

In addition to these global options, it is also possible to use the product options fields to define different selling prices based on ship method or destination.

Sales tax is reasonably well handled too. During the initial program set-up merchants define which state they wish to collect tax from and at what rate. They also define whether or not a product is taxable when they add it to a catalogue. Then when a customer places an order the program checks if their state of residence matches the merchant's specified state and adds sales tax to the order total if required.

After a customer places an order they automatically receive an e-mail acknowledgement that carries unique order and customer IDs. The merchant can customise this acknowledgement message if they wish. Online order tracking is available if the UPS ship tables are in use.

The merchant also receives an e-mail notification that an order has been received, but for security reasons needs to log on to a secure server to get full details of the order.

Processing orders online is very simple. There is only one function - delete! The merchant is encouraged to print off details of orders as soon as they are received and then for reasons of security to delete them immediately from the system.

On the downside, EasyCart is short of some order processing features. There is no inventory management capability, no online order tracking (unless UPS shipping tables are being used) and no ability to set discounts for nominated or volume purchasers.

Administration
The tools provided for day to day running of the store are fairly basic. Product details are updated using a form that is accessed from the main menu. There is no capability to put large numbers of items on "special" - each product needs to be updated individually.

There are only three reports provided each a presenting a different view of the order history - an overall order summary, a customer summary and a product summary. While these reports are better than some I've seen, they are still fairly rudimentary.

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Links
EasyCart		http://www.easycart.net/ecarts