The hosting giant, GoDaddy, known for their “edgy” Super Bowl TV ads just got themselves competition – HostGator.com. In a press release issued today, HostGator announce their partnership with NASCAR:
Competing web hosting companies HostGator.com and Go Daddy will go bumper-to-bumper this Friday at Chicagoland Speedway for the NASCAR Nationwide Series Dollar General 300. Joe Nemechek will race the No. 87 HostGator.com Chevrolet, competing against the No. 7 Go Daddy car driven by Danica Patrick.
According to the press release, this is the second time HostGator “races” against their rival GoDaddy. First time around leaving GoDaddy in the dust:
This is HostGator.com’s second race in the Nationwide Series. Their debut was last week for the Coke Zero 400 in Daytona where veteran driver Joe Nemechek qualified 32nd and finished 16th and currently is ranked at 22. Danica has completed three races so far this season with a rank of 70.
Is this the sign of things to come as far as web hosting is concerned???
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One of the most common questions submitted to us by readers and visitors to this blog is in regard to shopping cart solutions, e-commerce web hosting solutions and general questions about running an online store. We have decided to publish a number of posts about an online stores. We will write about software you can use and web hosting you might need.
Today we would like to start with a list of readily available free web applications for you to help you create robust online stores. Some of these applications may be already available in your hosting account, especially if your web host offers Fantastico or SimpleScripts.
OpenCart
We decided to begin with OpenCart, even though you may have to download and install this application on your server by yourself. We do hope that OpenCart will eventually become popular enough for most of the web hosts to include it in their Fantastico or SimpleScript scripts for easy installation. While not without a “learning curve”, OpenCart is n extremely robust shopping cart solution, with dozen of powerful features. Here are some of the OpenCart features:
- Unlimited Categories
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Manufacturers
- Multi Currency
- Multi Language
- Product Reviews
- Product Ratings
- SEO Friendly URLs
- Google Base Feed
- Google Sitemap
- SSL Support
Magento
Magento is another very popular shopping cart solution. It is likely that Mgento can be installed with your hosting provider through Fantastico or SimpleScripts. The free version of Magento also known as Magento Community Edition. We find that Megento Communit Edition is does not have nearly as many features as OpenCart.
osCommerce
Another popular free shopping cart solution is osCommerce, and is available for installation with most web hosting providers via Fantastico or SimpleScript installation bundles. Here are some of the features available in osCommerce shopping cart:
- Supports unlimited products and categories
- Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
- Multilingual support
- Multicurrency support (with automatic of currency exchange rates)
- Secure transactions with SSL
- Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
- Accept numerous online payment processing (PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
Zen Cart
Zen Cart claims to be the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. Zen Cart installation is also available with web hosting providers who that offer Fantastico and SimpleScripts bundles. Here are some of the features available in this shopping cart:
- multiple customer modes
- unlimited category depth
- multiple sales and discounts
- multiple display modes
- multiple shipping options
- multiple payment options
AgoraCart
AgoraCart is a powerful “Free” Open Source ecommerce shopping cart software – offers you a very wide range of features that allow you to setup an online storefront or shop ranging from a simple template based store for novices to the integration of complex web design concepts created by your web designer. In addition to the free version, there is also a premium version of this software. We believe that free version of AgoraCart does not offer enough functionality as compared to either OpenCart or osCommerce. However the lifetime license of the AgoraCart Gold is just one-time fee off $55.
CubeCart
CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world. CubeCart currently offers two versions (v3 and v4) on the v3 is free however it includes a “copyright” footer which can be removed for additional fee.
We hope that the above list will offer you good start in your research on solutions to power your online store. If you currently use any of the shopping carts on your website, please share your experience in the comments. Feel free to leave links to your live shops.
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