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!

One of the biggest features that everyone loves is the drag-and-drop layout design.  With hundreds of templates included for free in the software, the ability to sell in multiple currencies, Search Engine friendly links and inventory management, the product is one of the best on the market!

Give their demo a try, you will not be disappointed. Hands-on Web Hosting is fully compatible with the Interspire Shopping Cart!

Interspire also offer a hosted solution for their shopping cart under the brand of “Big Commerce“.  There’s a few significant downfalls to their hosted version.  One of the biggest complaints that people talk to us about is that there’s limited backup ability.  While they claim to make backups of the websites, if there’s ever a problem and you need to restore something and their backup system failed – you’re up a creek!   Another issue people complain about is that since this is a hosted version, when they release a patch, they push it to all their live servers.  If for any reason the patch wasn’t 100% working (which has happened quite a few times), you can be left is a potentially crippled user experience until they come out with a new patch.  You also do not have the ability to tweak the shopping cart in any way other than a design template.  No custom coding allowed.

We recommend the Interspire standalone shopping cart version which can be hosted with us (or anywhere) to avoid the above potential problems, but if that doesn’t bother you and it still sounds good to you, check out their Hosted eCommerce Shopping Cart – Big Commerce