VevoCart Hosting: Compare Hosting

What is VevoCart?

VevoCart is a premium eCommerce solution in ASP.NET. A free community version is available with a limited set of features, but is sufficient to create a fully-functional online store. Upgraded Multi-Vendor and Premium versions are available with additional features. If you’re looking for a complete self-hosted eCommerce solution VevoCart is a great option.

VevoCart is much more than just a shopping cart add-on. It is a complete eCommerce solution. VevoCart can power your entire website and includes product pages, a wealth of categories and formattable menus, and complete thematic control. VevoCart does aim to become your complete webstore solution and even offers an integrated content-manager to allow you to create news stories, blog posts, or a knowledge database on your site.

If you’re looking for a shopping cart add-on for an existing site, look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for an application that can take care of every step along the way, VevoCart may be just what you’re looking for.

What is unique about VevoCart?

VevoCart offers a long list of features that are covered exhaustively at the application website. The most important features include strong layout and organization controls, a responsive layout that looks great on any device, and secure payment processing. There are three VevoCart products available (Community, Multi-Vendor, and Premium) but not all features are offered in each version. Check out the VevoCart website for full details on which feature are included in each version.

VevoCart offers a fully-responsive mobile-ready customizable design. If you use VevoCart worrying about device compatibility will become a thing of the past so you can focus on taking care of your customers.

Many VevoCart users are not programmers, and the folks at VevoCart know this. That is why they have implemented a feature called Live Design which allows you to customize your store’s look. Live Design lets you edit colors, the site background, fonts, and borders without having to touch any HTML or CSS. Full layout and appearance control is also possible since every version of VevoCart includes complete access to the application source code. So if you do have programming skills in HTLM, CSS, and ASP.NET you will be able to customize your store to look exactly the way you want it to. However, even if you don’t have those skills rest assured that VevoCart is provided with 6 complete templates that combined with Live Design will allow you to create a site that is your own without having to know how to code.

A robust store management admin panel is integrated into VevoCart to make store management easy. Store management features include the ability to create product pages organized by an unlimited number and depth of categories (for example: clothes > shoes > women’s shoes > athletic shoes > shoes by Brand X > etc.). VevoCart also supports stockkeeping by allowing you to upload the number of products on hand into the application. This will help you avoid the headache of dealing with backorders.

How will VevoCart help me reach my customers?

VevoCart offers integrated marketing features which do vary depending on which version of VevoCart you choose. Some of the most popular marketing features include the ability to manage customer details, accept subscribers, send out email newsletters, and offer various promotions such as quantity discounts and bundled discounts.

If you want to reach customers beyond your own website VevoCart can help you with that too. VevoCart offers integrated social media sharing with an AddThis button. This allows shoppers to share your products on many different social media sites drawing additional customers to your store.

Both the Multi-Vendor and Premium versions of VevoCart support eBay publishing, and Facebook shops. With eBay publishing you can use VevoCart to list products on eBay while still keeping the sale tied into your VevoCart installation for inventory management and record keeping. If your website has a Facebook fan page you can use VevoCart to monetize that space by creating a store within the fan page itself. Users on your Facebook fan page can then browse products and even make purchases.

I’m sure you hope many customers will find your website through search engines as well. The good news is that VevoCart has been designed to create SEO-friendly URLs which should help your store rank higher in search results.

VevoCart also offers several reports which will provide important information on how visitors are moving through your site. In addition, VevoCart offers easy integration with Google Analytics so you can have detailed information on how users get to your site, and what they do once they are there. By using VevoCart’s reports and user behavior information gathered from Google Analytics you’ll be better prepared to craft a marketing plan to reach your eCommerce goals.

What sort of payment methods does VevoCart support?

Before we get into the details it’s worth pointing out that VevoCart is PA-DSS Certified. What this means is that VevoCart process payments through a method (VevoPay) that has been audited and certified as secure. Bottom line: you can rest knowing that payment processing with VevoCart meets some of the toughest standards in the industry.

VevoCart supports many different payment methods. Processing payments is one of the trickiest steps in creating an eCommerce site and VevoCart has made it easy by providing simple integration with several popular payment options and gateways. Some of the best known options include: PayPal, Google Checkout, bank transfer, custom payments (check, cash), and support for credit card payments using several respected payment gateways.

VevoCart also offers the option to include shipping and taxes in your pricing. Many options are available including automatic calculation or manual input of shipping amounts and tax rates.

To make the entire process easy on you VevoCart even offers add-ons which can export orders, product details, and customer details directly to Quickbooks.

What does VevoCart cost?

VevoCart is offered in a free Community version. If you aren’t sure about VevoCart, or aren’t sure what version you need, start with the Community version. It’s free to download, and free to use. The biggest limitations of the Community version are that it only supports 6 payment gateways, includes VevoCart branding you aren’t able to remove, and does not include advanced marketing features such as eBay publishing and Facebook shops.

VevoCart Multi-Vendor Marketplace is a paid version that offers all of the features of the Community version less the limitations mentioned above. In addition, Multi-Vendor is designed for multiple vendors on a single website. If your eCommerce site will involve multiple sellers managing their own inventory and sales VevoCart Multi-Vendor will be your best bet.

The Premium version of VevoCart is a paid version that offers all of the features of the Community version less the limitations mentioned. It does not support multi-vendor sites, but it does offer multi-store capabilities (complete separate stores on separate domains) at a reduced fee. So if you plan to develop multiple separate eCommerce sites VevoCart Premium will be your best option.

There are additional options that will add some extra cost to your VevoCart site. For example, if you want to purchase tech support for your VevoCart site you can do so for an additional cost. In addition, there are paid add-ons available such as one popular option which allows you to export data to Quickbooks..

How do I install VevoCart?

The easiest way to have VevoCart installed is to let the VevoCart do it for you. However, this option will set you back more than $100. There are also developers who specialize in designing and deploying VevoCart sites who can assist you with installation, setup, and site design. However, most original installations of VevoCart Community are self-installed. The application files can be downloaded after registering for a VevoCart account, and installation instructions are provided with the download.

Server Requirements

In order to run VevoCart you’ll need an account with a hosting provider that offers Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.1 or later, support for .NET framework 4.0, and Microsoft SQL Database 2005 or 2008. In order to support all of these technologies your hosting provider will need to offer up-to-date Windows web servers.

In addition, if you’re considering the Multi-Store version your account must include ‘Enabled Broker’ and ‘Cache Dependency’ service. You should verify this with your hosting provider before moving forward.