I got an email from a good friend in the business a few days ago asking if 1ShoppingCart is still my favorite cart to use and I thought I would feature my answer here:

1ShoppingCart is still the favorite when these five pieces are needed in a single 3rd party managed system:

1. cart
2. affiliate program
3. auto-responders
4. security pieces that make a cart secure, and
5. tele-phone shopping cart support, all for $100 a month or less

However…

Anyone should go into 1ShoppingCart knowing its limitations too:

1. “Some” FireFox browser users and some MAC users will have trouble making purchases through 1ShoppingCart. Their support knows about it and they continue to refuse to address the issue in their software. And, of course, if someone can’t order through the form, they probably won’t contact you to let you know.

2. 1ShoppingCart has, we’ll say, a “lower than optimum” delivery rate on the emails they send out through their auto-responder system. It’s probably because they’re just so big that recipient email server companies just ban them altogether figuring people are just all using 1ShoppingCart for spam.

So, you can expect to get emails from people saying they only got 3 of your 10 auto-responder messages and you will need to send them the rest manually.

3. There are many short-cuts and tricks to 1ShoppingCart that you only learn after you’ve picked and poked at the system for a few months. Why 1ShoppingCart doesn’t know how to use their own system better I don’t know. I’ve made a list of them and give them to people when they sign-up through my affiliate link. So, that would be my suggestion too when referring to others is to have them sign-up through 1ShoppingCartFree.com (which is free for 30 days) and have them send me an e-mail once they have registered, requesting the list.

Of course, 1ShoppingCart should by no means be thought of as purely “the best” cart system on the market today. NetSuite is probably the best in the category of under $20,000 but plan on paying $10,000-$15,000 every year for it.

Our “new” solution that we will be unveiling in 2010 will be a cart that is setup on our own secured server and supported directly by my own team at HereNextYear.

It will be a combination of our cart + our broadcast email system + integration with a 3rd party affiliate program.

What I don’t quite have for you yet is what we will be charging for all three pieces combined. It will be a payment made by the year though for best rate instead of by the month.

Hope that helps.