When Total Site started to develop e-commerce solutions for our clients we looked at all of the options.

Option A: Canned shopping cart solutions provided by web hosting companies.

These are functional and inexpensive - but they have limited features. Even worse, hosted shopping carts are based on inflexible templates which make every store look the same. This was not the brand reinforcing user experience we wanted to provide for our clientele.

Option B: "Off the shelf" shopping cart solutions we could install and customize.

Comprehensive database driven solutions are powerful - but flawed. Placing products and transactions in a database makes management and administration of an online store easy and flexible. But our experience with web marketing told us that all of the work done placing products into databases was effort spent hiding them from the most important database of all - the search engine listings. Adding the fact that these solutions are expensive and require daily maintenance we chose to pursue another option.

Option C: Do it Yourself (the birth of the Gold Cart™)

Total Site wanted an ecommerce solution that we could customize to look and behave exactly the way our clients needed. With embedded Tru-Find™ code to allow each product in the catalog to be directly indexed by name in all of the major search engines. Oh - and it had to work on the servers at ANY inexpensive web hosting company.

Since such a product didn't exist Total Site decided to develop the Gold Cart™ internally.

Our initial Gold Cart Web Catalog surpassed $350,000 in sales in it's first 200 days - and volume increases each day. Subsequent clients have experienced similar, compounding results.