Perhaps one of the best kept secrets and best little-known deals in the world of e-commerce is a small independent shopping cart software company called Mals-e.com. Based in Spain, the owner (whose first name is Malcolm) specializes in one thing and one thing only — the most robust yet simple to use shopping cart software in the world.
Users can sign up for a free acccount with Mals-e.com to get the hang of the program, build a working shopping cart and start taking orders. If you wish to upgrade to the “Pro” version the cost is only $24 per quarter. Thus, for only $92 per year one can have a shopping cart that is fully compatible with all Paypal payment methods, Authorize.net, 2Checkout and most every one of the remaining major credit card or online payment processors that operate online.
The beauty of Mals-e.com is that is entirely web-based and each individual setup option is listed separately. Thus, when setting it up, one can walk step-by-step through each bullet item in the setup area to set the program up and customize it to your satisfaction.
You can first sign up for the free version and then convert to the Pro version later. The free version is a fully-functionable version and will handle most all of the needs for work-at-home business owners. It even includes an affiliate management system so you can run your own affiliate program!
The Pro version is designed for much busier merchants and includes the following additional features:
- Remove the “Hosted by…” footer from the cart and replace with one of your own.
- Batch download of orders and payments either as one big page or in CSV format for import into a database or spreadsheet.
- Customize your secure cart pages
- Directly integrate the cart into the credit card payment gateways of Verisign, Authorizenet, Worldpay, Trustcommerce, Secpay and other supported Payment Solution Providors.
- Custom Admin area for your clients
- Advanced shipping calculations
- Simple transfer from free service
- For goods delivered on the internet you can setup an extra 500 products.
Mals must be one of the most gratified and successful work-at-home entrepreneurs that operate an online business. He has over 137,000 online businesses using the Mals-e.com shopping cart.
I will close this post by asking you the simple question, how many truly great web applications do you know that operates for a profit, but is willing to give away a full version of their software for anyone to use. And on top of this, Mal is always good about responding to support emails. He’s answered my personal emails (maybe 4 or 5 over the years) within 24 hours. Great product, great price and value, great service — what more could you ask for?