There are plenty of shopping carts on the market, but which one will work best for your business? Not all eCommerce software solutions are created equal. It’s important to evaluate your options based on flexibility, quality and quantity of features, support availability, ease-of-use, security, scalability, uptime and experience. Below are four of our most important criteria for choosing shopping cart software.

A hosted solution is a software platform that lives in the cloud of cyberspace. A non-hosted solution lives on your computer. A lot of businesses are wary of keeping data in the cloud because they think it’s less secure—but this is a myth. eCommerce solutions hosted in the cloud usually offer their security resources to the customer, whereas the customer is solely responsible for the security of a non-hosted solution.

With a hosted solution, software updates, maintenance and feature upgrades are performed automatically. For cost-conscious businesses, hosted programs usually have a smaller upfront cost. Many shopping carts on the market offer no support. Some offer support with low availability. Your best bet is an eCommerce suite that features highly available access to free support resources.

While online retailers hope they won’t need to deal with support teams, the peace of mind that comes with having support at your fingertips is invaluable. As an online retailer, you’ll have plenty of sensitive personal data running through your system. You want to build a trustworthy relationship with your customer, and your customer wants to know that their information is safe.

Credit card transactions made online require a PCI compliant payment portal. But it doesn’t end at PCI compliance; the more security brands and services offered by your shopping cart, the safer customer information is. Finally, you want to have the ability to scale up the features of your storefront without custom programming. Unique features like social media integration, the ability to post reviews, backend reporting to collect data on your customers and open API integration for new features as they are developed are all parts of a strong shopping cart.