We offer the expertise needed to build and manage a world class Windows based shopping cart with open source code. Alternatively, our clients can mange the building and promotion of their web sites and shopping cart on their own. It is the goal of our company to provide the software, skills and expertise to insure the success of any new venture. Almost every e-commerce site needs our software or our skills to survive the new marketing priorities forced upon us by the search engines. We now work and operate in an environment where the difference between success and failure on the on the web is not determined solely by the quality of the products we offer, but by the software systems and skills selected to win the battle of web site preparation and promotion and conquering the search engines.

You need five things to recover from a shopping cart software disaster.

Lets explore what can go terribly wrong with a shopping cart before we dive into the bells and whistles.

If your e-commerce site becomes successful, the danger of losing your business to a shopping cart disaster is real. Plan for it now. If you purchase a house, you buy house insurance. If you purchase a car, you purchase liability insurance. Insurance is not usually and issue unless you are young or purchasing a motor cycle. One makes the purchase and then gets the insurance as a matter of course. In this comparison however, understand one thing. You cannot purchase insurance for some kinds of shopping carts so lets look into the problem that traps the unwary.

You need five things to recover from a shopping cart software disaster. Basically you need insurance that the URLs of your shopping cart products can be transferred to another server any time or you could lose thousands of individual search engine registrations in the blink of an eye.

1. You need a copy of the shopping cart software that you use, on CD-ROM with authorized installation licences or keys. 2.You need a CD-ROM copy, or a hard drive copy or a tape backup copy of the current shopping cart software database you use where your products, customer information and orders are stored. The backup should be yesterdays backup, not last months. If a tape backup, you also need to own the tape player and have one in your possession with the required installation software on CD-ROM. 3. You need the shopping cart software HTML files including the graphic files and photos that make your shopping cart software and database work on the web, available on disk or tape. 4. You need to own your own domain name. 5. You need to have identified and qualified, in advance, a selection of hosting companies that will gladly setup your shopping cart software and system files and host your online store, on short notice. The hosting company must already have the database system used by your shopping cart software system, running on their server. Without all of these capabilities, you are in danger of losing your business some time in the future.

The insurance you need for your shopping cart is simply knowing with a certainty that you can accompish the five steps above and prove it.

Beware! Shopping cart software reviews and shopping cart software sites tell you lots about the features but not much about the negatives of using certain types of proprietary shopping cart software systems or services. If the source code for the shopping cart software is not 'Open Source' and if you can't run the software on most e-commerce servers, there is a danger that your shopping cart software will hurt your business badly or put you out of business completely, somewhere down the road, and in the blink of an eye! You need insurance that your shopping cart and the URLs it produces are completely portable.

Once you build your shopping cart, each product you add to your shopping cart software can be registered with the search engines. If you add 500 or 5000 products, you should have five hundred or five thousand registrations with each of the search engines that deliver traffic to your web site and make sales. The URLs (product web addresses) created by the shopping cart software are picked up by the search engines, added to their search indexes, and are as precious as gold. They are the foundation of your web marketing business. With 5000 products registered with five major search engines, you will have accumulated 25,000 separate search engine registrations! If your shopping cart software is not completely portable, your will likely be in big trouble sometime in the future.

The string of characters that the shopping cart software uses to publish each product on the web is a unique web page address made up by the shopping cart software and with the domain name you use. The system of characters or character string created by the shopping cart software is unique to each shopping cart software system. Here is an example.

http://dermessentials.net/cgishl/order/prodlist.exe/DE/?Template=ProdDetail.htm&ProductID=94

If your hosting service fails, if you don't own your own domain name or if you don't own the shopping cart software, your web business could be over in the blink of an eye. You could loose all of your product page registrations on the search engines, leaving you with the need to start all over again and no way to replicate the product page addresses the same way they were created before by the shopping cart software. Therefore, you lose all of your search engine registrations, and perhaps your reciprocal links, everything. It could take months to register new ones.

To insure that you don't suffer this fate, you must own your own shopping cart software, you must own your own domain name and you must be able to move your shopping cart software and your domain name to any e-commerce hosting system. To insure that your shopping cart software can be altered or repaired by any programer if the original shopping cart software maker goes out of business, you must choose a shopping cart software system with 'Open Source' code. A code that any qualified programer can read and modify.

If your shopping cart software is based on open source code and if you have in your possession a backup of your store database, (the data), and a backup of the shopping cart software and if you own your own our own domain name; and then if either the shopping cart software company or the hosting company you use goes broke or disappears, you can be back in business in forty eight hours.

If not, you risk losing your business. You will have to start all over again if you survive at all.

If your shopping cart software is not open source and the maker of the software disappears, no one can add a new feature to the software that you may need, make any changes or fix any bugs. Even if you own your own domain, your software has arrived at a dead end. Sooner or later, when you need to update your software to keep up with changes on the web, your business will be ruined. You will have to start all over again. Every product you carry will have to registered with the search engines from scratch using a new shopping cart software system.

If the software you choose is created using open source code such as ASP and connects to a MS Access or MS SQL Server database, or if the shopping cart software was created using Macromedia's Cold Fusion and uses a MS SQL database or MS Access database, or if the shopping cart software was created with any comparable system designed for use on a Unix server (platform), any qualified programmer can change the shopping cart software or fix it or set you up on a new server within forty eight hours after any disaster.

If your shopping cart software does not meet any of the open source standards that are described above, or if you don't own your own domain name; do something about it now. Don't wait until its too late. We can show you a workable strategy to convert your online business to an open source shopping cart software system immediately. You will be able to slowly wean yourself from the previous shopping cart software system as the new system takes over. While you will have to operate two stores for a few months, you won't loose any business this way. Protect your future now. Ensure that you have a copy of your store data delivered to you every day and keep it stored safely.

Searchaid can equip you with an open source shopping cart software system that has five star reviews and is used by thousands of users around the world. A system that has been under constant development for years and will continue to grow with you and your success. You will never outgrow your shopping cart, even if you host half a million products or more. There is no real limit that bandwidth and hardware can't overcome.

Give your web site a fitness test! Contact us for a free written and personalized evaluation of your e-Commerce site or shopping cart's optimization and readiness for search engine marketing and page ranking.