Empowering Small Businesses on the Web

You have to try to build soft­ware, and install soft­ware, and use a lot of soft­ware, before you start to appre­ci­ate just how much goes into good design.

For a few years, I have been help­ing clients set up online shop­ping carts. I’ve looked at OS Com­merce, Zen Cart, WP Ecom­merce, and dozens and dozens of other ones. Zen Cart was okay, com­pared to some.

But CS Cart is much bet­ter than any­thing else I have seen. The new 2.0 ver­sion is one of the nicest pieces of soft­ware I have worked with.

Front-end inter­face

Out of the box, the front-end is really beau­ti­ful. It is clean and func­tional, with lots of white space.

This is con­trary to most other default shop­ping cart tem­plates, which look very boxy, clunky, and cum­ber­some. It’s a mod­ern, prac­ti­cal lay­out choice: fixed-with cen­tered, and CSS-based, with an active width of 962px. They have obvi­ously thought about this a lot.

Also, there is a lot of Ajax, to make the inter­face feel easy to use and fast.

The color palette is ver­sa­tile, mod­ern, and very pleas­ing. Even out of the box, this is a cart that peo­ple would actu­ally want to buy from. This is a really nice feature–maybe you’re a small busi­ness that doesn’t want to spend the money right now on a cus­tom design. It’s a very nice thing that, out of the box, CS Cart would give you some­thing you can work with, and add to later, as more resources become available.

CS Cart front end, out of the box

Drilling down to the prod­uct dis­play level, the inter­face con­tin­ues to be friendly, appeal­ing and extremely usable.

Prod­uct Detail

It works like you’d expect it to, and want it to. (But not like it does in a lot of older, “Web 1.0″ carts!).

Click on any of the smaller pho­tos, and they instantly replace the main image–rather than open­ing up some other win­dow, or mak­ing some tired new HTTP request.

Click View Larger Image, and a light box appears (with­out lots of bor­ing wait), over the page, dis­play­ing the larger image. And, that light­box has thumb­nails for all the smaller images, and if you click on these, they–again, seemlessly–replace the other image. I have to say, this imple­men­ta­tion of a light box dis­play is actu­ally nicer than a lot of light boxes in fancy web­sites I have seen.

The other tabs, such as Fea­tures and Reviews, pop up instantly, via DHTML, rather than mak­ing you wait.

Back-end inter­face

Back-End Inter­face

The back-end con­trol panel for CS Cart is gor­geous as well. It is neatly divided into large, easy-to-read sec­tions with bold, easy-to-read tabs. As I have found through­out the design of CS Cart, a designer has really been at work here.

Click­ing on any of the large tabs–Orders, Cat­a­log, Users, etc.–instantly brings up a list of sub-links, that clearly spell out the var­i­ous sub-areas.

Again, the actual panel areas them­selves are clearly marked, sim­ple, and easy to read. While a graphic designer has clearly been at work, a user inter­face designer has also clearly been at work. And, taken the time to get things right. (Sim­plic­ity is harder to get right!)

I con­sider it a major, major ben­e­fit, that the cart I help my client set up is very easy to use. They’ll have to use it, and I really want them to feel con­fi­dent and com­fort­able. This cart gives me lots of con­fi­dence about that.

Fea­tures

While the back-end is very beau­ti­fully designed, and has a feel­ing of sim­plic­ity, CS Cart also has really all the fea­tures I have been able to think of, that a cart should have. Once again, to be able to design an inter­face that has all the fea­tures you’d need, but also is sim­ple and easy to use, is no small feat! It’s accom­plished by lots of care­ful think­ing about where things should go, how they should work, and  how they should work with all the other things.

Some of the fea­tures that stood out to me, as might-not-haves, that CS Cart does have, include:

• Drop ship handling
• Com­ments and reviews
• Coupons
• A tes­ti­mo­nial manager
• Excel­lent man­age­ment for “sta­tic” or “CMS” pages for the rest of the con­tent of the site
• Good WYSIWYG editing
• Built-in affil­i­ate programs
• In-browser upgrades

The list goes on.

Code

On the cod­ing end, CS Cart is beau­ti­fully designed and mod­u­lar­ized PHP. The design ele­ments are neatly bro­ken up to make design mod­i­fi­ca­tions eas­ier. The lay­out is fully CSS-based. There is even a Cus­tomiza­tion Mode that allows you to view the site with the abil­ity to make tem­plate changes inline, from the site.

There is a lot to say here–a whole series of posts, really. But suf­fice to say, they have really thought this through, as well. And, e-commerce is com­pli­cated. To get it all right is a lot of work. To see how much atten­tion and time has gone into this one makes me happy.

Sup­port

I’ve set up CS Cart for a few clients, and their Helpdesk tick­et­ing sys­tem works really nicely. I’ve logged sev­eral sup­port tick­ets, from the obvi­ous, to the very com­pli­cated. In each case, they’ve responded quickly, and, hontestly–they really knew what they were talk­ing about! They’ve been polite, hep­l­ful, and smart. They went right in and fixed what was wrong, and in every case, it was some­thing I just hadn’t quite fig­ured out, and not a prob­lem with their code.

Sum­ming it up, I really wanted to write a long post about CS Cart, because I appre­ci­ate how much care has been put into this soft­ware. It is one of the nicest-designed web apps I have seen, and, as I said, e-commerce is not easy! I want to see them do well!

You can find CS Cart soft­ware at http://www.cs-cart.com.