Last Friday I met with the owners of my latest site design, C and T Iris Patch, for a launch meeting. It went really nicely. I like it when clients are gung-ho to learn something new, and enthusiastic about the fact that I try to use applications that make it as easy as possible for them to conduct their business.

In this case, I used OptionCart for their 3000+ item catalog, with the Mal’s E-commerce backend. I’ve talked about both before. I really can’t say enough about OptionCart - I love it because you can drop it into any existing HTML or PHP-based site using includes and it works. It looks pretty good right out of the box, but with a minimum of customization it blends right in with the look and feel of the site in general.

The admin panel for OptionCart is very simple, compared to other products like X-Cart or ZenCart. It’s intuitive, doesn’t have that many functions, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This client in particular is selling a product without a lot of options associated with it (i.e., the flowers don’t come in multiple-sized containers) and just needs an easy way to manage selling online. OptionCart is perfectly suited to a catalog that’s very robust, works great but doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. Clients are comfortable with it because it has an intuitive interface and the choices on what to do are well-defined and fairly obvious.

In short, it’s a cart that makes the administration end of things easy to deal with and kind of ‘invisible’ - it works without you being aware of it most of the time. That’s my favorite kind of website functionality.