REviEW: Google Checkout: Store Gadget

Well, for as good (cheap, easy, effective) as DotNetNuke is, one of the drawbacks is finding an inexpensive way for clients to set up a similarly good (cheap, easy, effective) shopping cart for their site.

With the recent demise of alicommerce, we set out to find another shopping cart that would serve our clients well.

After a bit of searching and testing, I came up with trying out Google Checkout's new "Store Gadget."  I haven't been impressed with Google Checkout in the past, but this time was different and very smart.  My goal was to create a page for a coffee shop to sell gift certificates (page is here).

Within 5 minutes of starting the process, I had a rudimentary cart up and live (I already had a Google Checkout account and was familiar with Google Docs).  ANother 20 minutes was all I needed to modify my graphics and content to the following: http://whitesalmonground.com/GiftCertificates.aspx.

Pros:

• extremely easy set-up and maintenence
• moderate flexibility in product offerings (you can have one attribute which varies :: color, size, etc)
• unlimitied products
• transaction (and needed SSL) occur on Google's sites so no extra work needed.
• Easy Google Docs customizations.

Cons:

• limited ability to change things like colors (background or font)
• Cannot have product changes which affect price
• Cannot have multiple pages of products

Summary:

We like it...  for what it is.  Small clients with a handful of items to sell will do well with this gadget (remember: cheap, easy, effective).  Clients that have a variety of items or categories will need to go bigger.  This will be great for little guy whose store isn't his business, but who has stuff to sell related to his business...

The Store Gadget can be found here.

reviewed by: Tim Hardin, 1/2010