What shopping carts are supported?

Since 2000, Hands-on Web Hosting has used and recommended the X-Cart Gold product by QualiTeam. With more than 2000 X-Cart Gold shopping carts hosting with Hands-on Web Hosting, a few dozen X-Cart Pro shopping carts and more than 100 users using the LiteCommerce software also developed by Qualiteam, Hands-on Web Hosting has the proven track record to host your site or shopping cart in compliance to their software requirements.

Hands-on Web Hosting has made a name for itself in the X-Cart Gold and Qualiteam LiteCommerce software. We were one of only 3 hosting companies recommended by X-Cart to host their product from their beginnings and are listed in their manual and on their web site as a viable hosting solution. Qualiteam started their own hosting company in 2008 however until that time Hands-on Web Hosting was also hosting all of Qualiteam’s clients. Through the “Ready-2-Go Hosting” program offered on the X-Cart website, customers could purchase their software and automatically sign up for hosting with Hands-on Web Hosting. When X-Cart launched their own hosting solution, the Ready-2-Go Hosting program ended.

We are still strong X-Cart believers and we still host more than 2000 X-Cart Gold Shopping carts, however the program is not for everyone. You will need knowledge of PHP, Smarty and HTML if you wish to customize the look and feel of your store. If you don’t have the skills necessary to edit your site, we recommend NetVision Web Services as they have modified many of our clients shopping carts and have even developed custom applications for Hands-on’s Shopping Carts.

We’re also very fond of Interspire Shopping Cart.

To say that the Interspire Shopping Cart software will blow away the competition is an understatement of the greatest kind. We have been working with Interspire for most of 2008 and it is our new shopping cart of choice. When X-Cart made their debut in 2000 it was the best shopping cart on the web. The price is still very affordable, however often, in order to get the product to do the things you want, you have to EXTEND the software with custom code (expensive) or with additional modules (not cheap either). At the end of the day you’ve spent another $1000 and still haven’t developed the website!

Interspire took a different approach. Give EVERYTHING to the user. No need for 3rd party modules to integrate shipping, or to make the program usable for a company with more than 5 customers. Interspire inherently supports pretty much every 3rd party module that you would purchase if using X-Cart Gold. You don’t need to know any HTML, everything is done with drag and drop. Want a new theme/template? No problem, click a button and up pops your new site. It’s probably one of the easiest shopping carts that we’ve ever used and we’ve been using them since 1994!

Need something free? There’s a few to choose from; osCommerce, ZenCart, Magento Commerce and CRELoaded! osCommerce, ZenCart and Magento can be installed automatically from inside the Control Panel that Hands-on Web Hosting offers to their clients. With just a few simple clicks, the store is up and running. CRELoaded, while becoming very popular, still requires manual installation at this time. We have noticed some permissions issues with some of our customers when installing right out of the box so it will need some tweaking once you unpack the file on the server. Again, just like with X-Cart, don’t forget your programmer – we use, and recommend, NetVision Web Services and an SEO guy to make sure you’re getting the Search Engine results you should be getting!  We recommend Louisiana SEO Expert.  That’s who we use on our own website!