Review: Interspire Offers Inspiring Storefront Solution

Want an e-commerce system that's easy for small business owners to learn, understand and manage? Check. Want an attractive shopping cart that makes it easy and convenient for buyers to purchase goods? Got it.

There are lots of shopping carts out there. Some are so simplified that they limit their options in terms of capabilities, appearance and customization. Other shopping carts offer so many options that small businesses require in-house expertise to get the systems up and running and maintained.

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Interspire, on the other hand, takes a solid middle ground that balances ease-of-use with industrial strength. It shows that a middle position doesn't have to be mediocre.

By Design

Like the best shopping cart systems designed for small business owners, Interspire makes it easy to select catalog designs — and switch between them — and offers a surprising array of features for storefront layout customization.

To start, Interspire offers a collection of attractive and professional-looking online catalog designs. All you have to do is click on a design to select and apply it to your store and then upload and incorporate your company's logo.

Design Inspiration Interspire's customizable storefront layouts. (Click for larger image.)

Something that many shopping systems can't easily do is allow you to customize your pages the way that Interspire does. You can customize your store's layout by simply dragging and dropping elements with your mouse. And to change text, you simply click and edit it. It's a first-rate approach that is intuitive and easy to use.

The system offers lots of flexibility to create and add pages to display text, images and links. You can link to other Web sites, display syndicated content from RSS feeds and display contact forms with customizable fields. You can also drag and drop to re-arrange the order in which pages appear in your catalog and each page can have unlimited sub menus and sub pages.

We found the management pages to be intuitive and easy to browse and use. The management page offers a clear tabbed interface that lets you access orders, customers, products, Web site content, promotions and statistics. Additional options that reside on the top of the page include those for store design, user accounts, tools, settings and more.

(Continue to Page 2 for Accounting, Shipping, Pricing and Marketing Details)