What is the Best Shopping Cart for Joomla?

Hello Joomla user. I’m excited to be sharing this with you because the fact that your website is built on Joomla, already tells me a lot of good things about you. I know you want to be on the cutting edge, and you also want to be efficient and affordable. You are most likely a small business owner, who whats to do big things online. I also know, that you are looking to find the Best Shopping Cart for Joomla. After watching the video above, you will certainly have that answer.

3 Most Recommended Shopping Carts

There are actually 3 different shopping carts that I recommend, based upon the stage you are at in your business. For about 10% of my clients my recommendation is PayPal. For about 80% I recommend ProCart.org, and for the remaining 10% I recommend Infusionsoft.

PayPal can be helpful as a shopping cart in the very early stages in your business because it’s free and easy. Infusionsoft is on the other end of the spectrum, in that it’s expensive, and complicated, however, when you enter the big leagues and have an email list size of 15,000 or more, you’re definitely going to want to look into it. For everything else in between I love ProCart.org. Now there are other popular shopping carts out there, so I put together a chart that shows the pros and cons of the most popular.

you’ll see across the top, I’ve included the top 3, PayPal, ProCart.org, and Infusionsoft. In the forth column I’ve listed a couple popular shopping carts for Joomla, that represent open source shopping carts that you actually install on your website, Virtuemart & ZenCart, and in the last column I’ve listed Big Commerce & Shoppify, to represent the dozens of hosted shopping cart solutions out there that provide the website platform as well.

Right off the bat, if you are a Joomla user, then you want to avoid every cart that fits in the last column. You’ll lose your ability to have custom design, you won’t own or have full control of your website, you can’t do SEO. Basically it goes against every reason why you chose to work with Joomla.

Ok, the reason I also don’t recommend carts in the 4th column, is while many of them were made especially for Joomla, they are much too cumbersome and complicated. If you have 1000’s of products, then these carts might be worth looking into… maybe…. but they mess with your custom design, and change how the rest of your website functions, and that can be really irritating.

My 3 favorites, I like to call Copy & Paste Shopping Carts. One of the greatest things, is you can have one shopping cart account, and use it on multiple websites, or platforms such as social media or even email.

If growing your email list is important to you, then you already know about auto-responders. Having you shopping cart and auto responder in the same system, as in ProCart and Infusionsoft is a big big advantage. You no longer have to manage prospects and clients separately.

Just a little side note on AutoResponders… there are a lot of good ones out there, from MailChimp, Aweber, iContact, Constant Contact. All of those I would group together on one end of the spectrum, and Infusionsoft sits on the complete opposite end of the spectrum as the ultimate powerhouse auto-responder. ProCart sits in the middle.

From a Shopping Cart perspective, ProCart is easily the best on the planet. From an auto-responder perspective, Infusionsoft is the best, with ProCart coming in Second, and I’ll add the caveat, the you need to be ready for infusionsoft. I typically recommend people use pro cart for a few years until they are ready for infusionsoft.