Welcome to our CS Cart review article. CS-Cart is a comprehensive ecommerce software solution with easy-to-use interface that allows you to start selling online immediately. Its feature set fits into businesses of any size, from a small single-product shop to a full-featured on-line store. Designed for ease of use along with flexibility, CS-Cart is equipped with the latest ecommerce innovations (like one-page checkout, AJAX-based web interface, block manager and others) built into a highly configurable and modifiable sales and promotion engine.

 

Admin Section

CS Cart has a great admin section.  The great use a white space everything is functionally where you think it should be it’s quick and intuitive.

 

 

It’s the little things that really make this work such as the quick menu.  This is a menu that allows you to easily jump to sections of your E commerce store.  The if that wasn’t enough it allows you to easily move this menu to the most convenient spot your browser.  It’s this attention to detail that we appreciate with CS Cart.

Drag and Drop Interface

If you have a blog or if you are familiar with WordPress then you know how this functions.  You essentially have what are called widgets that you can move around in a what you see is what you get drag and drop interface. 

 

 

This is powerful you can do this on a left or right sidebar or other elements of your E-commerce web site design.
It’s a great function for creating a dynamic web site but also it makes it easy to modify or update your storefront.

Out of the Box Themes

When you’re developing any commerce web site you wanted to look great but you also want to be quick.  The out of the box themes from CS Cart look great in are easy to modify.  There are well over 30 themes to choose from as a launching pad for any type of E commerce web site you would design.

 

 

From there the customization is rather simple.  Because CS Cart is an open source software you have the ability to get inside modify the code to your liking.  All these themes do look great and they contain all the elements that you would expect from a modern E commerce storefront.

Search engine optimization

This is a critical element of any modern store front on the web.  You want your website to be found by the search engines, you want your categories and your products to be found when people are searching.  What’s great about CS Cart is the gives you the ability to edit SEO elements across categories and products.

 

 

Items such as title, meta description, meta category, and met a tags all are standard fare for the solution.  You can also get as granular as customizing your URL.

Heavy Use of Ajax

This is one of the best features its liberal use of Ajax.  This is the ability to load elements within a web page without physically reloading our web page.  You typically see this on search elements or product drill downs.
This feature is well liked and adds to usability and a great customer experience. 

 

 

This is a standard feature of CS Cart and gives a professional polish to any storefront that you create.

One Page Checkout

This is one of those things that you only appreciate when it’s not in place.  The one page check out clearly defines the path that a customer needs to go through to order a product from your store.  This interface is highly intuitive and is one that’s hard to beat.

 

 
The standard layout of the one page checked out contains four quartets contact information, address, shipping method, and the payment method.  There’s also a sidebar that explains your cart items and gives you a total of your order.

Inventory Management

This is big because you never want to sell a product that’s not in stock.  The ability to manage a wealth of products and multiple SKU’s is a welcome feature.

 

Inventory management and managing your product base is very intuitive.  Integrating the shopping cart into any back in solution also is a breeze.

What We Wish CS Cart Did Better

While CS Cart is a great solution for any E-commerce store there are few things that we wish were a little more polished.

Export Feature

There are times when you need to export certain data out of your store.  Such as mailing addresses, recent orders, or orders of specific products.  We’ve found it frustrating that there isn’t an easy solution to export data.  We would expect an easy way to drill down data points or relevant information to a CSV file or an excel spreadsheet.

Email Marketing

It seems all E-commerce Solutions include an element of email management.  While that’s a great what we have found is that most are not as robust as necessary to manage any meaningful e-mail communications.  Most likely you won’t utilize the e-mail features of this program, you’ll stick to a more robust out the box solution such as a Aweber or Icontact.

Recent Example

WholeSaleKeychain.com is a e-commerce website that sells hundreds of key chains–selling key chains in the automotive, sports, digital photo and other niche product bases. High search engine rankings and a well designed e-commerce website is what makes this site successful.