Author Archives: TMDHosting

Oct 26

TMDHosting partners TomatoCart

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We are glad to announce that we have recently established a long term relationship with one of the most promising, perspective and probably award winning shopping carts on the market — TomatoCart.

TomatoCart is a new generation shopping cart, which is already on the market of the Open Source technology for one year now. Thanks to its developers’ and community efforts, it has become a very stable, innovative and, as they define it, a “new generation” shopping cart.

Most probably, every single new product defines itself as innovative, stable and unique; however the cases in which it really that astonishing are quite rare and exceptional. Luckily TomatoCart is one of these exceptions and this is one of the reasons to be nominated in the 2010 Open Source Applications awards, in the categories “Most Promising Open Source Project” and “Open Source E-Commerce Applications”.

One of the features, which make TomatoCart really innovative, is the whole new way of managing your store. TomatoCart provides “desktop-alike” environment, which is way more intuitive and convenient for both newcomers in the online business and people managing stores since the beginning of the .com boom. In the spirit of the “desktop-alike” environment, you are provided a powerful and fully featured email client in the backend, so you can stay focused on both your store and email in the same time.

Another of the great features that make TomatoCart is the powerful and, in the same time, lightweight framework the application is running onto. This guarantees better speed of your website, which always results in better load times and experience for your visitors.

The dynamic times we are living into require day-to-day decisions based on research and how would you better research your visitors than by analyzing their behavior on your website? TomatoCart team thought of that, too and integrated Piwik, which is an open source alternative of Google Analytics. You are able to analyze your visitors with couple of mouse clicks, without having to expose your data to third parties.

Before you proceed, you should be aware that there is no technical or designer knowledge required to run your store – TomatCart made it quite easy, meaning you can edit pages in real time using their content management system and file manager. Each product page you create is being automatically assessed by the built-in Search Engine Optimizer, which generates keyword-rich URLs and meta information.

Of course, if you have reached this line, you should have already be aware that our TomatoCart hosting package is fully compatible and ready-to-go online with few clicks.

TomatoCart is also very open to the market, meaning that they are focused to become a worldwide open-source shopping software vendor. They are proving their intentions by preparing more than 56 translations. You can find the TomatoCart translations here.

The translations, as you most probably suspect already are not commercial — they are being performed by the great TomatoCart community.

In order to get you better acquainted with the TomatoCart project, we have prepared a lot of great stuff, which we will be releasing in the upcoming month. The first portion of it is a great comparison overview between “the old generation” and “the new one” (which TomatoCart already proves to be).

You can find a great comparison in various subjects between:

Stay tuned for more on that subject. A lot of great stuff to follow ;-)

Oct 26

TomatoCart V1.1 vs. ZenCart V1.3.9

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Preface:

ZenCart and TomatoCart are both open source shopping cart based originally on osCommerce, running on the LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Developed since 2003, ZenCart has gained popularity with its reliability, solid feature list and ease of use. However, TomatoCart, started in 2010 is still a rising star, which is well known for its innovative “winbows” admin panel with more concern about user experience and functionality.

This article is written for those who are not familiar with TomatoCart or those who can’t make a decision when facing the two eCommerce solutions. Focusing on functionality (built-in functionality in majority) comparison, the content of the article is objective with no discrimination.

Essentials:

Both carts are quick to install and easy to learn. The requirements of two carts indicate low cost on hosting. However, different from web 1.0 technology based osCommerce, TomatoCart applies the modern web 2.0 technology such as RIA (Rich Internet Application), Ajax, which provides a familiar windows operation environment and boosts the operation efficiency.

Appearance:

Front end:

Tomato Cart Front End

ZenCart Front End

According to w3schools’research, most users are using a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels or higher, with a color depth of at least 65K (Learn more?).That means, compared with the Zen Cart’s 750px width template, TomatoCart’s front end with a template in 960px width caters to more users nowadays.

Back end:

Tomato Cart Back End

Zen Cart Back End

See any difference? Right, Zen Cart inherits the traditional looking of osCommerce; while the desktop-looking admin panel of TomatoCart is multi-window-supported, which brings clients sleek and efficient operation experience. What’s more, you are allowed to set shortcut, auto run, quick start and context menu at your discretion.

Site Management:

Site management, generally speaking, should include all the basic tools to organize your sites and it decides the performance of your sites and the flexibility of your site settings. In addition to basic site management tools, TomatoCart has created its unique tools such as department management, which allow customers to choose the department they’d like to contact. While ZenCart is featured with:

CMS:

CMS, simplifying your publication of web content, is a special and indispensable part of shopping cart software. If you wanna make your site attractive, impressive and distinctive, you should turn to help of CMS. Ranging from simple article to indicative video, high-end CMS is capable of doing nearly anything you comes up with. But it doesn’t absolutely indicate the more, the better. It’s up to your demand. Never be too greedy, which always run counters to your desire.

Catalog Management:

As a proverb says, effort doubled, result halved. I do believe a clear catalog layout makes your work simple! Let’s take a careful look at this part.

Product Management:

TomatoCart is featured with a sleek experience when you are adding new products; however, ZenCart is a little messy.

Customer Management:

How to manage your customers? Treat them all the same? Definitely not! Different treatment is needed here to boost your online sales. For example, you can divide them into several customer groups and give them different discounts according to their order records. In a word, a perfect customer management is also a powerful marketing tool.

Order Management:

Sometimes, orders will be taken by phone, which requires the shopping cart system with a manual order-adding functionality. Sometimes, customers may return a product. And sometimes… There are a lot of exceptions you have to take into consideration. Let’s see whether your shopping cart software has thought of the exceptions in advance!

Marketing, Sales and SEO:

Nowadays, Marketing is considered as a key to popularity and success. Without exception, it is also a significant part of shopping cart software. Built-in promotional tools not only cut down on the cost but also boost your revenue. Aside from promotional tools, SEO brings you a good result when customers are searching store or product via search engines.

Checkout:

Checkout determines the sales conversion. Customers will be bothered by complex check out processes and limited choices.

Payment Gateways:

People all around the world definitely have different favored payment methods. What if they can’t find the gateway they are looking for or there is no other alternative payment gateway?

What a frustrating shopping experience! Consequently, multiple choices of payment methods should be prepared to satisfy all kinds of need. Here we just compare the built-in payment gateways of both shopping cart.

Till now, TomatoCart supports more than twenty integrated payment gateways.You can check them out here. As to ZenCart, you may see its payment module add-ons here.

Oct 26

TomatoCart V1.1 vs. osCommerce V3.0

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Preface:

OsCommerce is the first and greatest open source ecommerce project developed by a group of freelancers. No one could deny the positive influence it has made on modern life. On the other hand, as a separate project branched from osCommerce, TomatoCart, backed by a specialized company, inherits the highlights of osCommerce, and create new ideas at the same time. So TomatoCart is standing on the shoulders of the giant.

This article is written for those who are not familiar with TomatoCart or those who can’t make a decision when facing the two eCommerce solutions. Focusing on functionality comparison, the content of the article is objective with no discrimination.

Essentials:

Both carts are quick to install and easy to learn. The requirements of two carts indicate low cost on hosting. However, different from web 1.0 technology based ZenCart, TomatoCart applies the modern web 2.0 technology such as RIA (Rich Internet Application), Ajax, which provides a familiar windows operation environment and boosts the operation efficiency. If you want to migrate from osCommerce, there’s a ready osCommerce Migration Tool (Download?) and you need no worry about learning curve.

Admin panel of TomatoCart

Site Management:

Site management, generally speaking, should include all the basic tools to organize your sites and it decides the performance of your sites and the flexibility of your site settings. In addition to all the contents of site management of osCommerce, TomatoCart has created its unique tools such as department management, which allow customers to choose the department they’d like to contact.

CMS:

CMS, simplifying your publication of web content, is a special and indispensable part of shopping cart software. If you wanna make your site attractive, impressive and distinctive, you should turn to help of CMS. Ranging from simple article to indicative video, high-end CMS is capable of doing nearly anything you comes up with. But it doesn’t absolutely indicate the more, the better. It’s up to your demand. Never be too greedy, which always run counters to your desire. By comparison, it seems TomatoCart take advantage over osCommerce in CMS. Of course, it is not too difficult for you to find some add-ons to implement the CMS of osCommerce. Internet is full of free and paid resources.

Catalog Management:

As a proverb says, effort doubled, result halved. I do believe a clear catalog layout makes your work simple! Let’s take a careful look at this part.

Product Management:

TomatoCart is featured with a sleek experience of adding new products. Compared with TomatoCart, osCommerce’s product management seems a little simpler with little functionality. However it may affect the sales to some extent. Say zoom image will increase sales since it enables the detail magnification and clear look at the product.

Customer Management:

How to manage your customers? Treat them all the same? Definitely not! Different treatment is needed here to boost your online sales. For example, you can divide them into several customer groups and give them different discounts according to their order records. In a word, a perfect customer management is also a powerful marketing tool.

Order Management:

Sometimes, orders will be taken by phone, which requires the shopping cart system with a manual order-adding functionality. Sometimes, customers may return a product. And sometimes… There are a lot of exceptions you have to take into consideration. Let’s see whether your shopping cart software has thought of the exceptions in advance!

Promotional Tools and SEO:

Nowadays, Marketing is considered as a key to popularity and success. Without exception, it is also a significant part of shopping cart software. Built-in promotional tools not only cut down on the cost but also boost your revenue. Aside from promotional tools, SEO brings you a good result when customers are searching store or product via search engines.

Checkout:

Checkout determines the sales conversion. Customers will be bothered by complex check out processes and limited choices.

Payment Gateways:

People all around the world definitely have different favored payment methods. What if they can’t find the gateway they are looking for or there is no other alternative payment gateway? What a frustrating shopping experience! Consequently, multiple choices of payment methods should be prepared to satisfy all kinds of need.

Furthermore, you can check the frequently updated list of TomatoCart’s supported payment gateways here.

Oct 26

TomatoCart V1.1 vs. Prestashop V1.3.1.1

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Preface:

Prestashop is a free open source shopping cart developed in France. The exquisite interface and powerful functionality make it renowned outside the hometown. The design of Prestashop, blended with the France romanticism, is fascinated. Likewise, TomatoCart is developed based on osCommerce which should be considered as the origin of open source shopping cart. Robust foundation, all-out innovation and incomparably comprehensive functionality enable TomatoCart become one of the most promising shopping cart software.

This article is written for those who are not familiar with TomatoCart or those who can’t make a decision when facing the two eCommerce solutions. Focusing on functionality comparison, the content of the article is objective with no discrimination.

Essentials:

Both carts are quick to install and easy to learn. The requirements of two carts indicate low cost on hosting. However, different from the interface of Prestashop, TomatoCart applies the modern web 2.0 technology such as RIA (Rich Internet Application), Ajax, which provides a familiar windows operation environment and boosts the operation efficiency.

Admin Panel of Prestashop

Admin panel of TomatoCart:

Site Management:

Site management, generally speaking, should include all the basic tools to organize your sites and it decides the performance of your sites and the flexibility of your site settings. In addition to those basic site management tools, TomatoCart has created its unique tools such as separate mail system, in which case you needn’t worry about missing any emails..

CMS:

CMS, simplifying your publication of web content, is a special and indispensable part of shopping cart software. If you wanna make your site attractive, impressive and distinctive, you should turn to help of CMS. Ranging from simple article to indicative video, high-end CMS is capable of doing nearly anything you comes up with. But it doesn’t absolutely indicate the more, the better. It’s up to your demand. Never be too greedy, which always run counters to your desire.

Catalog Management:

As a proverb says, effort doubled, result halved. I do believe a clear catalog layout makes your work simple! Compared with TomatoCart, Prestashop’s product management seems a little simpler without individual upcoming product and featured product management system.

Product Management:

TomatoCart is featured with a sleek experience of adding new products. Different from TomatoCart, Prestashop hold all the steps to add a product, no matter upcoming or featured product in one page, which seems a little complicated and messy.

Customer Management:

How to manage your customers? Treat them all the same? Definitely not! Different treatment is needed here to boost your online sales. For example, you can divide them into several customer groups and give them different discounts according to their order records. In a word, a perfect customer management is also a powerful marketing tool.

Order Management:

Sometimes, orders will be taken by phone, which requires the shopping cart system with a manual order-adding functionality. Sometimes, customers may return a product. And sometimes… There are a lot of exceptions you have to take into consideration. Let’s see whether your shopping cart software has thought of the exceptions in advance!

Promotional Tools and SEO:

Nowadays, Marketing is considered as a key to popularity and success. Without exception, it is also a significant part of shopping cart software. Built-in promotional tools not only cut down on the cost but also boost your revenue. Aside from promotional tools, SEO brings you a good result when customers are searching store or product via search engines.

Checkout:

Checkout determines the sales conversion. Customers will be bothered by complex check out processes and limited choices.

Payment Gateways:

People all around the world definitely have different favored payment methods. What if they can’t find the gateway they are looking for or there is no other alternative payment gateway? What a frustrating shopping experience! Consequently, multiple choices of payment methods should be prepared to satisfy all kinds of need.

Furthermore, you can check the frequently updated list of TomatoCart’s supported payment gateways here.