Online shopping cart reviews

We're doing a makeover of our website store. I've spent hours trying to decide on our approach, since this is a major decision for us. I've considered three options:

1. Hire a programmer to write us a custom store. This has the advantage of potentially getting me exactly what we want (and nothing I don't want), but it will either be rather expensive (if I have someone local do it) or difficult (if I use an off-shore programmer from someplace like rentacoder.com.)

2. Use a free, open source store like OSCommerce and invest some time myself into figuring out how adapt it to my website. This is an attractive option since I'd like to learn how to do this, but my time presents a high opportunity cost.

3. Buy or subscribe to a professional, ready-built store. There are hundreds of these on the internet, and the difficult part about this is figuring out which one is the best fit for us at the price we want to pay. I searched for hours to try to get an objective ranking of these sites, stumbling past very disorganized pages at Wikipedia, pseudo-rankings filled with Ad-Word links, and old lists, trumpeting the state of the art (in 2004). Finally, I came to TopTenReviews.com, which had exactly what I was looking for--an objective ranking of the top ten shopping carts in 2007! I really like this TopTenReviews.com site; it seems like the ConsumerReports for Web 2.0 and media. I will definitely return here again. (BTW, it ranks ShopSite as #1. I used ShopSite in the past and found it to be very good, but it had some minor annoyances. Hopefully they've fixed these by now, but I'll probably try #3: MonsterCommerce.com. I'll report back on how well it fits our needs.)

"Cheapo" flights online

A European friend coming to the states asked if I could help her purchase a cheap ticket online last week.

I went through my normal routine:

1. Go to www.kayak.com. Kayak usually has very good fares because it directly searches the databases of most travel sites (orbitz, travelocity, etc.) as well as the airline websites (delta.com, jetblue.com, etc.) However, they didn't have a very competitive price to get from Europe to the states.
2. Check out travelocity.com directly. I know it probably shouldn't have anything that kayak.com wouldn't pick up, but I decided to check anyway. Nothing.
3. Finally, I googled "Sofia Salt Lake airfares" I came up with a site I'd never heard of before: cheapoair.com. This seemed like a VERY fly-by-night name (no pun intended), but I decided to check it out anyway. They returned very cheap flights--about 2/3 the price of the cheapest one on Kayak.

How was cheapoair.com able to do this? Well, one way is that they don't limit their flights to be on a single airline the whole trip--some flights included legs from Bulgarian Air, Czech Air, and United all in the same package. I'm not sure how that works--whether you need to recheck your baggage after each leg, or if the airlines are communicating and recheck it for you. I was a little wary, though, so I didn't select one of those options, instead finding a slightly more expensive one that stayed with Czech air the whole time.

The other way it looks like cheapoair is able to do this if by charging TONS of fees--we're talking nearly $200 in fees for a $375 ticket. Even after paying the fees, this was still the cheapest option, but I don't think I've ever seen so many fees.

Anyway, I found out that cheapoair IS a legitimate website--I spent a decent amount of time talking with them on the phone (long story), and I already have my purchased ticket in hand. SO, despite the name, this appears to be a reputable company. Make sure you know how large the fees are before booking through them, but I will now definitely include them on my list of places to check for airfares.