Interspire Shopping Cart

Quite a cool cart! Here are the first things I noticed based on a slue of other carts I have had a lot of experience with as a consultant. These are areas which are rare in the turn-key e-commerce industry. Most all the professional carts all have the shipping, taxes, payment, etc. Nothing to gawk at there, however, the areas below are what really catches my eye.

Pricing

$295 USD for the starter edition is great! Most e-commerce are priced at about $60 per month and then sky rocket upwards to $1000 or more.

Setup

I love the self servicing carts that are built smart and easy to host on the server you choose. This gives me the flexibility to configure and load it however I want. Now this may not be for everyone, so they also will be offering hosted solutions soon. I like options, what can I say.

The User Interface

The administrative UI is quite impressive. In many of the more robust shopping cart systems (Volusion, X-cart, Nexternal, Monster, Pinnacle), you end up running into some information architecture issues with slow and cumbersome navigation. There are so many points of information in some carts that it all starts to turn into noise after a while. With Interspire, I was pleasantly impressed with their selection of information and the presentation thereof. They did it without sacrificing functionality or burying elements. I would highly recommend giving it a free tour to see for yourself.

Design

An important factor in any e-commerce is differentiating yourself from the other thousands of e-commerce sites. That usually takes form in the design. Interspire has a really easy way to change and manipulate all aspects of the design without hardly any knowledge of scripting and CSS languages. The drag-and-drop and private labeling are nice touches. You don’t want your competition knowing what solution you are using!

Development

You can also customize your entire store to fit your specific needs. The powerful add-on and API possibilities are exciting. I have had issues in the past (with other carts) submitting support tickets or enhancements and never seeing them done. A big part of e-commerce is how you continue to develop and meet the challenges of your industry.

Note: Interspire’s e-commerce template is in PHP which is way easier to find developers in. I like. I like. This shopping cart really does deserve a tour.