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Review: Three Wise Storefronts Offer Free Services
By Wayne Kawamoto
December 6, 2007

FastCommerce.com
The most traditional e-commerce service of the three, FastCommerce.com is a complete system that offers a free subscription with no setup, hosting or transaction fees. In a sense, the free portion of the service is based on the old shareware concept. Try the program out for free and if you like it, you may eventually sign on and pay for more sophisticated features.

The service includes a product catalog, shopping cart, shipping calculator and auto-e-mail responder. It also supports inventory and comes with order and contact management features. For no cost you're limited to 50 products and no tech support. But if you can live within these constraints, FastCommerce.com is a bargain.

FastCommerce serves a first-rate shopping experience to customers who can browse and add products to carts and register before they complete their purchases. After entering a zip code, the cart generates shipping rates for UPS and FedEx, and after the sale, customers receive confirmation e-mails. For now, the company only offers a single template with three color themes but promises more templates and color variations in the future.

Go Speed Racer: If you're selling less than 50 products, FastCommerce can get you up and running an online store for free. (Click for larger image.)

There's support for all major credit cards, but you'll need a payment gateway and merchant account. You can purchase an optional SSL certificate to secure your Web store at $199 per year. A downside, FastCommerce currently lacks support for PayPal and Google Checkout, but again, the company promises these are coming soon.

The entry-level service is truly free. You only pay when you upgrade to the company's Growing or Enterprise plans, which offer the ability to list more products — "Growing" up to 2,000 products at $29.95 per month, "Enterprise" up to 10,000 products at $99.95 per month. With these pay plans you also get support via e-mail, instant messaging and actual humans. If you want support for the free Startup Plan, it's priced at $200 year.

To encourage you to sign up, the company says that its offer of free e-commerce service is for a limited time. But once you sign up, the company promises that it will be free as long as your usage stays within the quota. If you're selling less than 50 products, FastCommerce may be worth the look.

(Continue to Page 3 for KonaKart review details)

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