When Total Site started to develop e-commerce solutions for our clients we looked at all of the options. These are functional and inexpensive - but they have limited features. Even worse, hosted shopping carts are based on inflexible templates which make every store look the same. This was not the brand reinforcing user experience we wanted to provide for our clientele.
Comprehensive database driven solutions are powerful - but flawed.
Placing products and transactions in a database makes management and administration of an online store easy and flexible. But our experience with web marketing told us that all of the work done placing products into databases was effort spent hiding them from the most important database of all - the search engine listings. Adding the fact that these solutions are expensive and require daily maintenance we chose to pursue another option. Total Site wanted an ecommerce solution that we could customize to look and behave exactly the way our clients needed. Oh - and it had to work on the servers at ANY inexpensive web hosting company.