Since its inception in 2007, Shopping Cart Elite has provided flexible eCommerce solutions for online merchants. The software is easy to use, with a wide-ranging feature set that earns it our TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award among shopping cart software. Perhaps most notable about Shopping Cart Elite is its straightforward approach to site design and rich marketing tools that can help you grow your online business.
Shopping Cart Elite employs a unique and simplified approach to web design. Instead of offering a multitude of templates to choose from (as most other eCommerce shopping carts on our lineup do), the software has a single master template with endless customization options. Using this master template, you can change virtually anything you want, including colors, fonts, banners, images and more. Advanced users can even change the HTML and CSS code.
Shopping Cart Elite includes all the essential administrative and inventory-control tools you need to manage your website. These include bulk product upload and edits, as well as 
detailed inventory reports that tell you how many units of each product you currently have in stock. A unique alert system allows you to input a specific point at which to be alerted to low inventory, and it has a proprietary algorithm that predicts your future sales based on past sales. The shopping cart software allows you to upload an unlimited number of products and to create as many categories to accommodate those products as you want.
Beyond inventory control, Shopping Cart Elite offers an intuitive catalog manager and robust accounting features. The software can integrate with your existing accounting software, or you can use Shopping Cart Elite's built-in accounting features to track payroll, expenses, assets and other business financials.
Unfortunately, the software does not currently have a mobile app, so there is no easy or convenient way to access the back end of your website from your smartphone or tablet. However, at the time of this review, Shopping Cart Elite told us that a mobile version of the software is in the works.
Site creation may be the first step in building a successful online business, but it's only part of the equation; marketing constitutes the other half of operating an online business. Many website owners, especially those who are new to eCommerce, aren't well versed in online marketing, so it's important for shopping cart software to provide useful and accessible marketing tools. Shopping Cart Elite excels in this area, delivering most of the marketing tools we look for in shopping cart software, including the ability to set up an affiliate program and promote your website on popular social media sites. Shopping Cart Elite also comes with built-in SEO tools that you can use to increase your site's visibility in search engines and to garner more traffic.
Perhaps one of our favorite things about this shopping cart software is its email marketing options. You can create entire email marketing campaigns with the software. You can brand outgoing marketing emails by customizing the look and content of the emails. There is an included auto responder, so you can create emails that will go out automatically to acknowledge an order or notify a customer of a shipping date.
We are impressed with this shopping cart software's security features overall. The software implements a virtual proxy firewall for all its websites, which is designed to detect and 
automatically block suspicious transactions on your site. There are tools that allow you to keep a close eye on your employees' computer use, including the ability to take screenshots and view what your employees do on their computers. You can even create unique logins for each of your employees, so you can grant and restrict access to your site's back office or inventory list. This makes the shopping cart software a good option if you own a large site that multiple employees help you manage.
The software is also PCI-compliant, and all Shopping Cart Elite webpages are SSL encrypted. This prevents unauthorized access to your customers' payment information when it is being transmitted to your payment gateway for authorization.
Whether you have general pre-sales questions or need help with a technical issue on your site, Shopping Cart Elite is supplemented with useful support options. For starters, you can access a built-in knowledgebase directly in the shopping cart software. This is a good place to find information about the software's many features and instructions for how to use them. You can also contact the company via email, telephone and live chat on its website for technical support and troubleshooting assistance. We received prompt and friendly responses to each of the inquiries we sent the company.
Shopping Cart Elite ranks among the best shopping cart software because it delivers powerful features for designing and managing an eCommerce website. We especially like its fully customizable design options and robust management features that allow you to track every single product in your inventory. While there's no easy way to access Shopping Cart Elite on a mobile device, the shopping cart software's benefits far outweigh such drawback small shortcoming.
