Latter-day Village Square

I admit it, I’m a big proponent of online shopping. Maybe the biggest reason is that I live in a fairly small Wyoming town that is hundreds of miles from larger shopping centers. Yes, we do have some local outlets, but our small Sears and Radio Shack franchisees are no match for company stories. And the largest big box retailers to move into town are not really big box. Our Home Depot and Office Depot stores are much smaller than the larger locations I was used to in Colorado or Utah. It’s 130 miles via freeway to the east to Rapid City SD and its Rushmore Mall, or 120 miles via single lane highway to Casper. But with my browser, I can shop anywhere and have it delivered right to my door, which does my severe sciatica no harm.

Consequently I see a lot of shopping carts. Latter-dayVillage.com uses a shopping cart we chose almost five years ago. We chose it then because it was compatible with the site design (colored tabs) we had at the time. That shopping cart software has evolved over time, adding features that have helped us grow our business and our ability to help our customers find products that help them in their church callings and family lives.

However, our shopping cart requirements have outgrown that software’s capability. We want to be able to offer more and more LDS oriented products from a single shopping source (LDV online storefront), which we believe is a real benefit to our users and browse-by customers. We are investigating two shopping cart solutions that will allow us to build an LDS shopping mall, if you will. The first is ZenCart, an open source shopping cart that is a branch of the popular OSCommerce project. The other is Xcart, proprietary software that has almost all of the features we are looking for. Ideally, we’d have a selection made and implement long before the Christmas shopping season, but we have not planned that far ahead. However, I will post information here as this project progresses.

If either of these solutions do not fulfill our requirements, we will expand our search until we find the best fit.