No matter what kind of website you run, it’s important to test it on a regular basis.  There are several reasons for this:

1. Hosting changes – your hosting provider could tweak settings, or make bigger changes without telling you.  Any of these could break the functioning of your site in some way.
2. Programming changes – any changes you and/or your programmer makes can have unintended consequences.  Something could break in an unrelated area.
3. 3rd Party changes – any 3rd party sites that you integrate with – Facebook, authorize.net (credit card processors), ad servers, etc. can modify how their API’s work.  If this happens, your site may break.

I often have clients notice an issue with their site and I ask “when did this first occur?” and they aren’t sure.  In some cases, I can tell the site has been like that for months, maybe years.  The client simply never noticed the problem, until a customer pointed it out.

So, how should you do this?  Come up with a plan for testing various and critical parts of your site.  If you are an ecommerce provider, this means actual transactions.  Set up a coupon that let’s you buy something for a few dollars, and put through a transaction using all payment types you accept.  Test all relevant components of your site.  The frequency of the test should be related to how important the site is to your business.

Doing this routine  testing has the side effect of giving you a chance to review your customer experience, noticing areas that might be improved.  But it is important to keep a close eye on how your site functions.

If you want to sell online, there are many options, ranging from setting up your own shopping cart to using ebay.com or etsy.com to list your products.   I’ll examine the main pros and cons to each approach.

DIY – I’m calling the first approach DIY (do-it-yourself).  This is the approach where you either build or buy shopping cart software and run it on your own website.  You essentially pay once for the code / license, and then you are on your own.  One example of this that I have used extensively is Sunshop, which is php / mysql based.  Here are the pros and cons to this approach.

Pros:

1. Unlimited customization – if you get source code with the cart, you can customize (or pay a programmer to do it) the code to behave any way you want.  It can match your website in design and navigation.
2. Lower monthly costs – Usually you pay a one-time license fee, with optional yearly support and upgrades.  This cost can be drastically lower than paying a monthly fee and transaction fees imposed by hosted providers.
3. Stability – If you are happy with the product, you keep it the way it is.  You are not subjected to upgrades / modifications to how features work, or features you like being phased out.  If the original vendor goes out of business, you still can run the software since you own the license.
4. Data Ownership – You have access to all your data – products, customer information, orders, etc.  If you need to change carts in the future, or manipulate the data in some way, you have it all at your disposal.

Cons:

1. Up front costs – You’ll have to spend perhaps thousands of dollars to buy the license, install it, and get things up and running.  If you aren’t sure your products will sell, this can be a daunting investment.
2. Upgrades – As features are added to the product, you’ll need to upgrade your copy – this can be relatively easy, but if you have customized your version quite a bit, you’ll find upgrading to a challenge.
3. Security – Any security issues, PCI compliance, etc., are your responsibility.  This can be scary if there are any bugs in the code that hackers can exploit.

Hosted – third party – This approach consists of paying a monthly fee to use a hosted shopping cart solution.  Companies like volusion.com or 3dcart.com offer this type of platform.  Also ebay.com, etsy.com, and others fall into this category.  You set up your products and manage your store on their platform.  Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

1. Easy setup – These systems often have wizards to walk you through setup, and you can have your store online literally in minutes.   There may be tools to quickly import your products as well.
2. Low entry fee – No need to pay for installation, or a license fee.  Some do not even have setup fees and may offer a free 30 day trial.
3. Traffic – Many solutions like etsy or ebay bring in traffic and allow searching across all merchants.  So you instantly will have people looking at your offerings, which can start bringing in sales quickly, with little advertising.  This can help prove out demand for your products without a huge investment.
4. Automatic upgrades and security – The hosted provider will be responsible for maintaining the security of the platform, and upgrading features on a continual basis.

Cons:

1. Fees – Generally, you will pay a monthly fee and/or a transaction fee based on the amount of sales you generate.   These fees can go up without much notice.
2. Dependence / Lock in – If fees go up, or a feature you need isn’t implemented, you are stuck, at least in the short term.  You would have to either live with the limitations / cost, or move your store to another platform altogether.  Moving to another platform means pulling your data (if the host allows a full export), and import it into another cart system.  This can be time consuming and expensive.
3. Security – Large cart systems which have many merchants are big targets for hackers, simply because of all the financial / customer data stored in one place.  Although these carts are generally pretty secure, you can be sure they are constantly targeted by hackers trying to find vulnerabilities.

In the end, there’s no easy answer to the original question.  Over the years I’ve seen (and encouraged) clients to go with one type of cart or another, based on their particular situation and budget.  I think option 2 (hosted solutions) are gaining in prevalence, at least for smaller merchants, who are selling small volume on the side.  However, if you have a high volume of sales, and want to build your brand, the DIY approach will probably yield better results over time.

I recently upgraded 2 clients to 4.3.5 – both went pretty well, with minor glitches to work out. The 4.3.5 version may be the final release before the big upgrade to 5.0, which is a complete rewrite. I expect that transition to be a challenging one for most stores, so they may hang out on 4.x for a while.

Many hosting providers are starting to push users to php 5.4, as support for 5.2 and earlier is dropped. 1&1, for instance, is giving customers until April to switch (they are forced to switch in April). For many applications, 5.4 will not be a big issue, but some functions are removed in 5.4, so you should test your applications in advance, if you can.

I just completed an upgrade to Sunshop 4.3.4 for one of my clients. Overall the upgrade went well, with minimal errors to flesh out. With these upgrades the major issues are syncing up templates, and any code changes that were made. In this case, the code changes were nil, but the old site was running 4.2.0, so many templates had changed. For security reasons, I’m not listing the site (no need to broadcast any info about the software being run there).

In general if you can afford to upgrade to 4.3.4, that’s recommended. There are just too many security issues in the older versions. Even with patches applied, it’s best to do the upgrade.

Social picture site Pinterest has been taking off recently. It’s a website where people “pin” pictures of things they like, categorize and share them. Doesn’t seem initially like this has much business potential, but take a look at this article:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175367/Why-Your-SEO-Social-Strategy-Should-Include-Pinterest

The article writers did some SEO testing, and found some interesting results. A brand new site started ranking, and getting inbound links after pinning just 2 recipes there.

If your business has any images – products, etc. then you should probably set up a pinterest account and start posting there.