WebAssist Helps You Build a Better Shopping Cart
By Dan Muse

For years, Dreamweaver has been the choice for small businesses looking for a way to build a professional-looking Web site using a graphical approach that kept the coding requirements to a minimum.

The only problem is that while Dreamweaver lets you make a great-looking site, if you want to sell products, the software lacks e-commerce features.

That where WebAssist's eCart comes in. The software is designed to let you add a shopping cart to your Dreamweaver site. Dreamweaver, arguably the industry's leading Web site design tool, was originally produced by Macromedia, but became part of Adobe's product line when it was purchased by the graphics software giant in 2005. Dreamweaver was recently added to Adobe's Creative Suite 3, which also includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and other graphics applications.

Today WebAssist announced the release of eCart 4, which the company describes as a major upgrade that features a step-by-step wizard to build a checkout application, multi-language button support and increased payment gateway options.

Eric Ott, president of WebAssist, said that eCart's integration into the Adobe platform through Dreamweaver differs from hosted e-commerce services such as MonsterCommerce, ProStores and Yahoo Stores, because eCart and Dreamweaver together allow for a more personalized storefront.

"Monster Commerce, Yahoo and ProStores are approachable, but not customizable. People want professional designs," Ott said. "They don't want designs that look clipart-ish."

On the flip side, he said, however, the new user interface and checkout wizard are more approachable than options such as osCommerce. "osCommerce is technical — it's just a bunch of code. You need to figure out how to make it all work."

Ott said that the "checkout wizard is the home run" in eCart 4. "There are lots ot steps in checkout. It's still hard no matter what." However, he said with the wizard you can add state or country tax rules and shipping charges (with real-time quotes from FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS and Australia Post) to the checkout process. "We want to encourage the most transactions. The fewer the amounts of clicks, the less chance of abandonment."

The checkout wizard is also designed to handle order management and, with WebAssist's Universal Email, e-mail confirmation. eCart supports all major payment gateways including PayPal and Authorize.Net.

Ott said you can add the PayPal Express Checkout option to any site with the click of a check box. In fact, he said, one of the goals of eCart 4 was to make PayPal Express Checkout more prominent. "People weren't understanding what Express Checkout was all about. We've been using for for five months [at WebAssist] and 30 percent of sales are through Express Checkout."

The layouts created by eCart, Ott said, have been enhanced in design and code, and provide professionally crafted shopping cart displays with multilayered color palettes. The underlying generated code is structured to adhere to Web standards, he added. An included button library offers localized buttons in five languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Dutch.

eCart is now available for $299.99 from WebAssist. The extension is compatible with Dreamweaver CS3, Dreamweaver 8, and Dreamweaver MX 2004 on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. eCart4 also supports Windows Vista.

About the Author

Dan Muse is executive editor of internet.com's Small Business Channel, EarthWeb's Networking Channel and ServerWatch.