I always wanted to run my own online store and even made an attempt to create one. I was using the OScommerce software for my store. The OScommerce is great but it is not a finished product. A lot of customizations need to be build in in order to make the store functional and user friendly. But the main benefit of OScommerce is that it is free. But is it really free? Well, if you would count in the number of hours I spent modifying the code and multiply those hours by the hourly rate of let’s say 50$ an hour (that is the minimum amount that I would agree to for the work of such complexity) then you would see that OScommerce is not really free; it costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars to build and run a good ecommerce site.

Ashop is a shopping cart software that is not free but is really a complete product. One does not need to spend numerous hours tweaking the code to get something done. Ashop is very user friendly, the pages/sites created with ashop are search engines friendly. And it is very important for an online store to be search engine friendly. Why? Because search engines send highly targeted and FREE traffic to your sites. So, the better is your site optimized for search engines, the more free traffic it would receive.

Here is an example, I have a site (I will not mention its address here) that is a small site but every single page is optimized for search engines. The site runs on autopilot and brings me on average 400$ a month. By this I mean that I do not drive traffic to the site at all; all traffic is organic and comes from search engines. How? I have ads that point to affiliate products and the visitors sent to the site by search engines click those ads and buy the products.

Let’s get back to ashop. As I have already mentioned, it is very easy to use. Actually, there is no software to install and no technical skills needed to work with the application. It is not expensive to use ashop shopping cart application and the fee would include the software, hosting, 128bit encryption, email, payment integration, 24 hours support, and ongoing upgrades. The complete list of the features can be found on this page.
I would definitely give ashop a try next time I will be building an online store.

Nikolai