If you are looking for a new shopping cart, don’t waste your time drowning in review after review, screen shot after screen shot, and rant after rant.

Whoa, what?!

Yes. Reading shopping cart reviews from various bloggers, content sites and even from the shopping cart companies themselves are a big ‘ole waste of time. Why would I say such a thing? I’ll answer that tune in two notes:

1. Shopping Carts Are Always Changing

Each shopping cart worth its salt updates their list of features all the time. Sometimes big, sometimes small. As each shopping cart changes/evolves there are core changes (improvements?) to the customer support, functionality, and policies. The reviewers can’t keep up. Churning out a revised review of the various shopping carts would be like work which might sound fun if it were butter, but it’s writing and critical thinking, ya’ know hard stuff like that.

2. Cart Reviews Always Lack Stuff

Reviews are not 100% comprehensive. The reviews tend to leave a ton of things out which, in fact, may be very relevant to the reader but the writer may not see it that way. The writer may also be partial to one cart over another.

Hey, Mr. “pickle pants” Schawel why don’t you write an all encompassing, forever-and-a-day, comprehensive review of each cart? Um, no. That’s energy spent in futility. Each shopping cart has it’s own set of features and nuances – there are 100s of them. Everything changes and reading these reviews generally give you a false positive.

So What’s Your Advice for Picking a Shopping Cart Mr. “I-Think-I-Know-Everything” Schawel?

1. Turn off your computer. I know it’s painful, but try it. You might start to feel your legs again.

2. Grab a pencil/marker/chalk and start making a list of all the core items you need to operate online. These are core parts that you simply must have. I call them mission critical thingies:

• I need to have drop shipping because my catalog contains 1000s of products and I don’t have enough money to stock everything in the world.
• I want to automate (a.k.a easy peasy lemon squeezy) my shipping labels. I need them to be fast, accurate and trackable.
• I need a robust newsletter thingy for my huge, massive customer database.
• I need ultra custom design control for my ultra cool brand that makes everyone salivate.
• I need a hosted, turnkey shopping cart cuz it’s just me and my dog who manage this business. I don’t have a team of caffeinated developers to help me.
• My stuff comes in a ton of variations (colors, styles, sizes) and there are tons of conditions with each variation. I need to control them in a bunch of different ways.
• I need a shopping cart to sell digital / downloadable stuff.
• I sell in multiple currencies and need a way for users to toggle between them.

3. Now start a list with some cool thingies you want to have.

• I am a Twitter addict and realize that others are too, I want to integrate twitter somehow in my website.
• I would like an “easy” way to send my products to all those comparison shopping engines I keep reading about.
• I would like to create custom pages based on the category a user lands on.
• I want users to subscribe to a RSS feed of the newest of new.

4. Turn back on your “precioussss” computer.

5. Go and start ticking things off against the various shopping carts. Not only does this save a ton of time, it also will focus your energy in the right direction.

Caveat: this is not to be confused with “shopping cart comparisons” which do a decent job at comparing various feature sets against another shopping cart’s feature set.