Comparing Yahoo! Store with Less Expensive Options

"I currently have a Yahoo! store, for which I pay $49.95 per month. How does this compare to e-commerce hosting choices like Hostica (http://www.hostica.com/ecom/compare.html)? Hostica provides Miva Merchant options starting at $24.95. Any opinions or feedback from others?" -- Keri Stoner

I'm not familiar with Hostica, but their prices seem attractive. However, the lowest price isn't the best way to judge a shopping cart. A good reason to stay with your Yahoo! Store (http://store.yahoo.com) is the traffic generated by Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com). If you have consumer products that sell well during the holiday season, Yahoo! Shopping can be a real advantage in sending targeted traffic your way, though you'll pay an extra 3.5% for these sales.

Miva Merchant (http://www.miva.com) is a widely-used, capable shopping cart, though not as easy to set up as Yahoo! Store. But with Miva, or any other cart, you'll need to generate traffic to your product pages on your own. And Miva has the added problem of generating dynamic product pages that aren't search engine friendly. Dynamically generated webpages just aren't indexed by most search engines.

There are pros and cons to every e-commerce application. To see others' feedback, my paid subscribers have access to the results of a recent poll, "User Comments about Favorite and Unfavorite Carts," Web Commerce Today, 2/15/2003 (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct6/issue67.htm). Interestingly, both Yahoo! Store and Miva Merchant were among the leaders in both categories -- favorite cart AND unfavorite cart. People both love them and hate them. :-)