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Jon Madrid is the president and founder of Madrid
Communications (www.madridcom.com),
a web design, development and hosting company headquartered in
Granville, Ohio. He has serviced clients from North America,
Europe, and Asia and has developed a variety of customized
VP-ASP shopping cart e-commerce solutions to help meet their
clients’ specific business needs. He can be contacted at jmadrid@madridcom.com
or 740-403-6201.
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Exploring the VP-ASP Shopping Cart
By: Jon Madrid, Founder/President, Madrid Communications
The VP-ASP shopping cart software likely has far more features
and options to offer than most businesses will ever need, but it
also has many features that any business doing e-commerce will not
want to do without. In fact, you may be hard-pressed to find all of
these “must-have” features together in other packages. This
shopping cart system is one of the most well-rounded, comprehensive,
and versatile shopping carts available. Add to that the very modest
price (Lite version: $145, Standard: $195, Standard + Option
Package: $300), and you have an instant winner.
The cart is nearly ready to do business straight out of the box.
It takes only a few minutes to install and does not modify your
computer in any way. On the most basic level, there are just a few
configuration settings for you to update that define your cart’s
setup and environment before you can be on your way. Unless you
intend to use the default design and settings, however, you will
have a bit more customization to do in order to integrate the
shopping cart into your current site’s design and to make it
function exactly as you need it to. That is part of the beauty of
this shopping cart though; it can completely and totally be
customized. You can use HTML templates, along with the global
variables that are defined for commonly used fonts, table styles,
and related settings for the layout of the cart.
There are also over 300 configuration settings that define how
the site operates and behaves on a variety of different levels. This
is an excellent feature for shop administrators because you can
control most of the cart directly from the password-secured,
web-based control panel and not have to edit either the pages or the
code directly.
Another great advantage of this cart is that it is entirely open
source (written in ASP/VBScript). Therefore, you can delve even
deeper into customizations by editing program logic to make it
perform as you need it to. I have worked with a variety of different
businesses that have chosen to use the VP-ASP software, and each
time it has worked out to be an excellent fit, even though some of
them have needed unique customizations to the cart. Here are just a
few of the uses of the carts that we have customized: golf products;
kitchen and bath fixtures and plumbing products; music and file
products/downloads; books, tapes, and CDs; flowers and gift baskets;
mattresses and related products; and clothing products—just to
name a few. As you can see, the cart is capable of meeting the needs
of just about any business with any sort of product inventory.
When it comes to product inventory, VP-ASP has no bounds. Whether
you have one or one hundred thousand products, it is ready to handle
them. The cart comes with an Access database as the default and
performs very well for most shops. If you intend to have more
products or would like a more robust database, then you can use
either MS SQL or MySQL, which are also supported databases for the
cart.
This cart pretty much does it all, but if you find that you have
particular needs that do not fit the mold of the cart by default, do
not worry. Chances are that what you need can be added in and made
to work seamlessly with the rest of the cart. We have performed such
customizations for shipping calculations and dependencies, coupon
handling, user and customer accounts, advanced product features
generation, and a wide variety of others. Each time the particular
needs at hand were met, and the VP-ASP cart proved to be just the
right tool for the job.
You can find a complete list of all the shopping cart’s
features at the links provided below, but here are some of the more
notable ones:
All in all, the VP-ASP shopping cart is an excellent solution for
virtually any e-commerce need. VP-ASP has proven that it is
committed to providing a superior product by its open requests for
suggestions and recommendations for improvements and also by
continually improving upon an already fantastic shopping cart. Each
version that released is markedly better than the last. Its e-mail
technical support is fast (really fast) and friendly. There is also
a very active user discussion forum where you can find a great deal
of support and answers to most questions you have about the shopping
cart.
If you’re searching for the right e-commerce software package,
then look no further than VP-ASP. Thousands of current VP-ASP users,
in over 70 countries, will agree that VP-ASP is one of the best
solutions available.
Stay tuned to for some case studies of particular sites that we
have developed for our clients and get an inside look at how we
tailored the VP-ASP shopping cart to the exact needs of our clients.
Those case studies will be posted here soon.
Jon Madrid is the president and founder of Madrid Communications
(www.madridcom.com),
a web design, development and hosting company headquartered in
Granville, Ohio. He has serviced clients from North America, Europe,
and Asia and has developed a variety of customized VP-ASP shopping
cart e-commerce solutions to help meet their clients’ specific
business needs. He can be contacted at jmadrid@madridcom.com
or 740-403-6201.
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