Bizzy Mama is proud to offer zen cart hosting, oscommerce hosting and cube cart hosting to our clients via fantastico deluxe or "one-click script". We can also host any shopping cart software that you would like to purchase for yourself and install on our servers. You have many, MANY options when it comes to choosing the best shopping cart for your business. Here is some information on the three free downloads we offer:

Zen Cart- 5 out of 5 stars!

We love Zen Cart. A lot of people give it bad reviews, but our honest opinion is that Zen is just misunderstood. Granted, there is a bit of a learning curve there, especially if you are 1- brand new to the web or 2- switching from another cart.

One of the things we love most about Zen is how many great free software add-ons you can download directly from their website. The software itself is pretty light weight to allow you to modify it to your particular needs. To read more about Zen Cart, please visit their site here.

Some Zen Cart Pros:

• Easy to add coupon codes and sales
• Tons of great FREE add-ons from the large Zen community
• Unlimited category depth
• Newsletter manager

Some Zen Cart Cons:

• Moderate learning curve
• No WYSIWYG editor
• Somewhat difficult to template, especially for beginners
• Some common admin panel features are lacking

Cube Cart- 4 out of 5 stars

Cube Cart is a good option for smaller stores that don't intend to sell tons and tons of products. It is also much easier to template, even for beginners, and has a great WYSIWYG editor built into the back end making uploading content a breeze.

Cube Cart offers an open source (the one we offer) and a paid version, and requires that you keep their branding intact in order to use the open source of their cart. This means that in your page description, you will have your business name and then (powered by cube cart) beside it. You are also required to keep Cube Cart's link in the footer of your website (which is good web manners, anyway). For more information about Cube Cart, please click here to visit their site.

Some Cube Cart Pros:

• Easier to template, even for beginners
• WYSIWYG editor makes adding content easy
• Unlimited extra pages
• Very simple to add meta tags

Some Cube Cart Cons:

• OS version does not allow you to set-up coupon codes, and is also missing many common features
• There are not as many mods, free or paid to allow your store to grow with your business
• OS version requires you keep their name in your page description, which MAY harm your SEO
• Smaller community than both Zen and OSC offer

OSCommerce-

Maybe it's a little unfair of us to judge OSCommerce so harshly, afterall, they were the *first open source out there, and the one that our all time favorite, Zen Cart, is based off of. Thing is, OSCommerce is a little more difficult to learn and work with, and is missing a lot of the great features that other carts have standard. It's not to say that it's not a good option for many businesses, we have plenty of clients who love it! To read more about OSCommerce, please visit their website here.

Some OSCommerce Pros:

• East to add new categories and products
• Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
• Multilingual support
• Multicurrency support

Some OSCommerce Cons:

• Somewhat difficult to template, especially for beginners
• Missing some key features
• Moderate to high learning curve
• Fewer free mods than Zen