Small businesses who are considering the purchase of a shareware package for a shopping cart system for an estore ought to think long and hard about a few things:
1) Documentation may not exist
2) Implementing the system may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
3) Search engine friendly pages may not be an option
4) Server load may be heavy at busy times
Documentation may not exist
Since the package is actually a series of software programs that work together to process the sale of an item, absence of documentation will not be an issue for you if you are, yourself, a programmer, or if you number programmers among your staff. In every other instance, missing documentation means that repairs, modifications and additions to your site will require excessive amounts of time and effort. Should you find a programmer with whom you can work to tweak the program, you may well have to live with that person for ever, at least as far as your website goes.
Implementing the package may require "second order" customization, meaning changes to the package code itself
Once the underlying code of the package is modified, what was shareware is now "unique_to_you" ware. Features of the package, such as the control panel, may not work properly as the result of customization. Once again, if neither you, nor any member of your staff is a programmer, whoever modifies the package will need to be your friend, perhaps for ever.
Search Engine Friendly Pages may not be an Option
The web pages published by the package will include information pulled from a database along with HTML tags and scripts (programs) that manipulate the database information along with the tags.
All of these operations will be performed "on the fly" or, in other words, on demand; page addresses may string together several parameters, meaning the code required to collect the database information, with a result that the address of the page is very long and, necessarily, unfriendly to search engines.
Server Load will be Heavy at Busy Times
Memory will be needed to run the programs that will make the package work. At times when your site is busy, package performance may be at its worst. Visitors will wait and then wait some more for pages to serve, etc.
For all of the above reasons I will only use packages that are well documented. In addition, the packages I use will output static HTML pages that will be friendly to search engines and a light load for the web server. I also strictly limit customer expectations to features that can be enabled from the package's control panel.
You can find out more about my web publishing efforts at Best Plain Web Pages.
A shopping cart system that meets my criteria is ShopSite
© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved